The Pigeon Tunnel: Errol Morris’s richly crafted portrait of John le Carré

A good spy, John le Carré tells us midway through Errol Morris’s interview portrait, is difficult to recruit. They should have an independence of spirit yet be looking for “institutional embrace” – in other words, dissemble for a higher duty; reinvent themselves yet always return home. “I see my life,” adds the novelist, who famously left the secret service but built his fiction on spycraft, “as a series of embraces and escapes.” In his telling, both in his 2016 autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel and here, such slippages were his childhood legacy. A con man father and a mother who ran out when he was five taught him the fallacy of stability and the “feeble membrane” between acclaim and shame.

Like le Carré (born David Cornwell), Errol Morris is drawn to men of power – first-hand testimony on history-making, the inside (but still blinkered) perspective on policy and its chaotic consequences drive his trilogy of encounters with American string-pullers: The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), The Known Unknown (2013) with Donald Rumsfeld, and American Dharma (2018) with Steve Bannon. In all three, Morris sought not to prosecute his single interview subjects but to give them a hearing.

Here, facing a fellow artist and interrogator of power, he is at his most amenable: seemingly conducted chez le Carré across sessions at his desk and dining table, the conversations have the polished affability of a prestige magazine profile, with le Carré’s glamour rubbing off on Morris, getter of big-fish interviews. (This was le Carré’s final interview, recorded a year before his death in 2020.) In a self-aware preamble, the pair discuss the nature of interrogation and interview and the need to provide for your questioner’s expectations. “This is a performance art,” le Carré says. And if Morris doesn’t know what he’s looking for? “Then we’ll struggle on and find out who you are.” Morris used to say the Interrotron, his speaker-to-camera interview set-up, enabled “true first-person” documentary. In The Pigeon Tunnel, it could equally be called a Reflexotron.

At the same time, le Carré was a man who had accrued some power of his own – and the will as well as the skill to control his own narrative. This is Morris’s second nonfiction adaptation/profile, after A Brief History of Time (1991), and among its layers is the hint of a commissioned or authorised work. As well as repeating and reflecting on stories from his autobiography, le Carré reads extracts. As there, he closes off talk of his love life in two sentences, whereas his biographer, Adam Sisman, claimed le Carré conducted affairs “like espionage operations, running women as if they were agents”, the tension feeding his writing. While reviewers saw the autobiography as a counter to Sisman’s book, or a “pre-emptive strike against posterity” (Robert McCrum), le Carré gives Morris a suavely obliging performance, broaching new topics with “no defensiveness because I don’t know what the accusation is”. The film is produced by two of le Carré’s sons – who themselves may have mixed feelings about their father’s legend.

An impressionistic patchwork in structure, Morris’s film is all fragments and canted angles in its framing and dressing: mirrors making multiple le Carrés; noirish dramatisations in shallow focus. There’s a physical claustrophobia and an emotional distance in these mini plays: a car boot closing on baby David as his parents flee the bailiffs; school and workplace scenes in long corridors, walls closing in. Le Carré’s title refers to an indelible image from his childhood of clifftop tunnels laid from a Monte Carlo casino his dad took him to, funnelling pigeons towards the skyline where “well-lunched” gentlemen awaited with shotguns; surviving pigeons would loop home to begin the game again.

Le Carré waxes lyrical on the thrill of duplicity that hooked Cambridge spy Kim Philby and casts terse judgement on his “evil”, a rare hint of his increasingly forceful political outlook. But it’s the blood betrayals of Ronnie Cornwell, the inveterate fraud and fib-spinner of a father, that the film spirals back to, le Carré’s first source of self-doubt. What lies beneath such fabulists – behind the smoke and mirrors of all our competitive storytelling? Can we find our way to a more illuminating self-knowledge – to an “inmost room” of secret truth and revelation – or are our hopes for reaching light as pitiful as the pigeons’? Morris stages the final story of le Carré’s book, ‘The Last Official Secret’, a parable of treasure locked deep in the heart of MI6. The quest is a red herring.

 ► The Pigeon Tunnel is part of the Debate strand at the 2023 London Film Festival; it is screening on the 11 and 14 of October.