Forget Summer — Remember One Of Spring’s Stronger Movies & Look Forward To Autumn’s Offerings

Fall is upon us and with it comes baseball pennant fever, Sundays chock full of pro football, and weekly prime-time television shows arriving with brand new episodes. The season will also bring the promise of heartier choices at the multiplex (and potentially thrilling blockbusters, as viewers of the tantalizing new trailer for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring can attest), erasing all bad memories of the empty calories this summer’s cinema offerings gave us. To whet moviegoers’  appetites for the more challenging fare ahead, and also to appease the couch potato mentality that can set in at this time of year, this week I’m reviewing The Tailor of Panama, which emerged on video and DVD shelves two weeks ago and has been among the top ten rentals since.

The Tailor of Panama, which was released in theatres earlier in the year, is a canny, clever movie based on the 1996 bestseller by John le Carre, who also produced this film and wrote the screenplay. Veteran director John Boorman seems in smooth simpatico with the author as they cast Pierce Brosnan in a sly, pseudo-satirical take on his 007 persona as disgraced British spy Andy Osnard, a conniving agent who has crossed too many lines and stepped on a few too many toes. After his last strike, a dalliance with the wrong woman, Osnard finds himself sent off as punishment to Panama City on assignment.

Once there, he befriends, rather disingenuously, fellow ex-patriot Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), the fancied seamster to everyone who’s anyone in Panama. Osnard believes that Pendel, who after all, has the ear of all the big-money bigwigs in the city, is the key to getting him the inside track on all private and pertinent info his British intelligence peers would covet. There’s only one small problem: Pendel, a family man with a picture-perfect household that includes a sophisticated American businesswoman (Jamie Lee Curtis) for a wife and two charming children (including one played by Daniel Radcliff, the star of the anticipated Harry Potter movie adaptation due this fall), is also a notorious prevaricator. (“liar” seems too strong a word for this genteel tailor.)

Osnard co-opts Pendel’s participation in this scheme because the British spy has discovered that Pendel has been living under false pretenses. Instead of ensuing from the apprenticeship of a famed tailor from Saville Row, Pendel is a former con who learned his trade in prison from shady “Uncle Benny.” Of course, his wife and kids know nothing of this, and that’s the way it will stay… unless Pendel decides not to help Osnard. But what the scheming opportunist does not anticipate is the bundle of tales which erupt from the mannered tailor and the subsequent repercussions that neither of the two could ever have foreseen.

The Tailor of Panama is a curious and fascinating mix of the realistic with the farcical. Boorman exposes the very real consequences of individuals’ actions as he explores the tightening web of deceptive exaggerations Pendel weaves (all with seemingly well-meaning motivations, yet nonetheless wrong) as well as the manipulations, both sexual and professional (and often the twain meet in this case) Osnard employs. In face, Boorman and Brosnan seem to be having quite a bit of cheeky fun investigating a “what-if” world in which James Bond is not mythologized or romanticized, but is put under the microscope for what one like him might truly be like.

The Tailor of Panama, rated R for very frank language and sexual situations, is an intriguing, a bit eccentric and often funny film that perhaps splinters a few spy-genre stereotypes, but most importantly reminds us that a lie is still a lie, and honesty is always the best policy.