“The Pigeon Tunnel” takes its title from something that le Carré (whose real name was David Cornwell) saw as a child: At a Monte Carlo resort, captive-bred pigeons were forced through a tunnel that led them toward shotgun-wielding men waiting to blow the birds from the sky. (The movie reenacts this supposed sport with simulated bloodiness.) Creatures corralled onto a path to their doom appealed to le Carré as a metaphor for a career in espionage. “The Pigeon Tunnel” was the working title for many of his novels, he explains, before finally becoming the name of his 2016 memoir.
Filmed about a year before le Carré’s death in 2020, Morris’s interviews with the bushy-eyebrowed author turn largely on his relationship with his father, Ronnie Cornwell, a con man who spent more than six years in various prisons. Also conspicuous in the writer’s childhood, if mostly by her absence, was his mother, who left her husband and two sons when le Carré was 5.
Although his family was often under financial duress, le Carré was sent to exclusive schools, where he says he met the contempt of young aristocrats with another con: “I turned myself into one of them.” He studied German at Oxford and, after a brief stint as a teacher, joined Britain’s intelligence service. He served from 1958 to 1964, ending the work after his cover was blown by Kim Philby, a genuine British aristocrat and a different sort of con man: a double agent for the Soviets for more than 20 years.
Philby’s duplicity and le Carré’s time as a spy in Germany inspired many of his novels, which were often adapted for movies and television. Morris’s conversations with the author are punctuated by clips from those productions, notably 1965’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” with Richard Burton as the tale’s antihero. The documentary mentions, but doesn’t develop into a significant theme, that le Carré’s depiction of unglamorous British spies was intended as a corrective to Ian Fleming’s cartoonishly swashbuckling James Bond.
As dramatized in one of the washed-out, slightly clunky reenactments, the teenage le Carré served as his dad’s bagman. While acknowledging that not all his recollections of his father are actually true, the writer asserts that his involvement in his father’s scams helped prepare him for espionage. What intelligence services want, he says, are people “who are a bit bad, but loyal.”
Le Carré is willing to discuss his own failings as a person, and positively eager to indict his father for his. But he flatly refuses to discuss his love life — reportedly complicated — and family, although there’s evidence that he got along well with sons Simon Cornwell and Stephen Cornwell: They’re among the film’s producers. Morris doesn’t ask about any possible faults as a writer, and le Carré doesn’t volunteer any. Also undiscussed are the author’s political stances or the fact that he, displeased with the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union, lived out the last few years of his life as an Irish citizen.
While Philip Glass and Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score gives “The Pigeon Tunnel” some momentum, the documentary lacks the drive toward truth that characterizes such exemplary Morris efforts as “The Thin Blue Line” and “The Fog of War.” The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy. The director even visualizes the idea that reality is prismatic rather than linear, occasionally fracturing the image of le Carré and his genteel environs into kaleidoscopic shards.
“This is a performance art,” announces the author at the movie’s opening, and what follows seems mainly to follow his script. Le Carré controls the tunnel, and the movie’s viewers are — frustratingly but at least not fatally — his pigeons.
PG-13. At area theaters; also available on Apple TV Plus. Contains some violence, smoking and brief strong language. 95 minutes.
