It has been said that John le Carré is the Graham Greene of our day — a writer whose thrillers encapsulate pertinent moral and political issues with a depth of artistry not always attempted by genre authors. Le Carré acknowledged this heritage in The Tailor of Panama, his playful take on the scenario of Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana (turned into a movie by Carol Reed). Now The Tailor of Panama has been filmed — with uncharacteristic visual plainness — by John Boorman.
The two narratives have in common a British spy in a Third World country, under pressure to produce useful information for the chiefs back home and resorting to fantasy to fulfil that brief. In The Tailor of Panama, though, it is not the Alec Guinness of Our Man in Havana producing the fantasies, but a combination of the roguish spook Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan) and the unfortunate tailor Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush).
Brosnan draws cleverly the traces of the superspy he has played in three James Bond movies, undercutting that iconography at the same time. His spy, Andy Osnard, has been relegated to Panama because of his gambling and womanising, whereas Bond would have been celebrated for exactly those activities; Osnard is as much of a stud as Bond, except that here his venereal activities are distinctly cheesy. Brosnan is even able to use his blandness as an actor to good effect — Osnard has a faint air of hollowness from the start. The fantastical world of James Bond gets brought down to earth, and the result is funny, tense, and coldly cynical about the realities of cloak-and-dagger politics in a venal society at the mercy of superpower machinations.
Rush is good, too, as the expatriate British tailor dealing with a few layers of fabrication of his own, from his murky past to the improvisations he feeds Osnard. Our sympathies are with him (and his American wife, played by Jamie Lee Curtis) as he wades ever further into trouble. For all his gullibility, however, and for all his sins, he remains the movie’s moral centre — a status signalled not least by his invincible commitment to the principles of good tailoring.