‘The Pigeon Tunnel’ Review: Thinker, Player, Searcher, Spy

When a onetime private detective sits down to question a former spy and confessed performance artist, you might expect some verbal fisticuffs, a bit of bobbing and weaving or defensive prickliness. And when the interlocutor is the filmmaker Errol Morris and his subject is David Cornwell, a.k.a the sublime fabulist John le Carré (who died in 2020), those expectations only intensify.

Yet “The Pigeon Tunnel,” a four-day conversation Morris recorded in 2019 (and adapted from Cornwell’s 2016 memoir of the same name) is nothing if not smooth, Cornwell’s sentences as creamy and cunning on the tongue as on the page. Polished, urbane and preternaturally prepared, Cornwell’s sometimes mischievous demeanor forms a kind of shadow narrative, a fascinating carapace that Morris’s interrogatory arrows fail to fully pierce. This drains the film of spontaneity, but pumps it full of a strangely satisfying intrigue: Who is playing whom?

Morris is a master exploiter of this kind of duality, and he sounds positively gleeful here. Returning repeatedly to the notions of deception, betrayal and performance — the movie’s three philosophical pillars — he coaxes Cornwell through his spectacularly unsettled childhood to his career as a young operative in the British Secret Service. A gift for artifice emerged early as he learned to emulate his upper-crust schoolmates and a social class to which he did not belong. Espionage came easily after that, his Cold War adventures spurring deep reflections on the nature of duplicity (the infamous double agent Kim Philby, he believes, was addicted to it) and fuel for the novels he would later write.

Looming over every anecdote, though, is the formidable shadow of Cornwell’s father, Ronald, a grandly unapologetic swindler and the film’s original deceiver.

“I can see my life as a succession of embraces and escapes,” Cornwell says at one point. And while he managed to avoid embracing Ronald’s final, heartless scam — perhaps the most tragic of the film’s many betrayals — it’s clear that he never fully freed himself from his father’s larcenous influence.

Much of this will already be known to those familiar with Cornwell’s memoir, his previous interviews or Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography. But even if you have never read a le Carré novel — or seen one of the many movies based on them — “The Pigeon Tunnel” will delight the curious. Cornwell might disappointingly refuse to discuss his reportedly colorful sex life, but he seems more than willing to bare psychological wounds. Of particular poignancy is his fear that human beings have no center, that what he calls our “inmost room” is empty and the things we seek mere chimeras.

Intellectually rich and cinematically disciplined (brief movie clips, another perfectly aligned Philip Glass score), “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a cautious, playful portrait of an expert manipulator. And though Morris’s dramatization of the titular event — Cornwell’s boyhood memory of a horrifying hunting trip — offers a delightful visual metaphor for Morris’s interviewing style, his other re-enactments are unnecessary: Surrender to Cornwell’s eloquence and the images create themselves. Exactly how many of them are inventions perhaps even he couldn’t have said for sure.

The Pigeon Tunnel
Rated PG-13 for wrecked birds and resolute smokers. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.