Now on Apple TV+: 'The Pigeon Tunnel' Is a Compelling but Scarce Introduction to the Humanity of John Le Carré

By Alberto Cox Délano | Film | November 14, 2023 |

By Alberto Cox Délano | Film | November 14, 2023 |

In The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré -or David Cornwell, his nom de real-life- describes himself as somebody fascinated by treason, which was at once the human motif of his literary work and the guiding affair of his previous life as an officer of the British Intelligence Community. But what makes John le Carré such a fascinating figure in himself is that he was a particular kind of traitor, or more correctly, a double agent: A capital-L Literary author whose oeuvre was also a regular of the best-sellers lists, in a similar weight class as hacks like Tom Clancy or his opposite counterpart, Ian Fleming. David Cornwell was a writer who happened into the Secret Service, not the other way around.

Directed by Errol Morris, and made as a companion of sorts to le Carré’s autobiography of the same title, The Pigeon Tunnel treads back into the forces that shaped le Carré’s life and career with precision, but perhaps because of its compact running time, you do feel wanting for more of the documentary. The Pigeon Tunnel works perfectly as a seductive 101 to the work of Cornwell/le Carré. Still, it would’ve benefited from not just being a companion piece but a longer dive into the biography of its subject, a character perfectly suited for Morris’ trademarks. Unlike some of his usual subjects, though, Cornwell is an eager interviewee, an open book, and both Morris and Cornwell recognize each other as craftsmen in the art of getting the truth out of someone.

The pigeon tunnel of the title recalls a memory of Cornwall traveling to a hotel in the Mediterranean with his father, in which pigeons were raised or captured on the roof and pushed along a tunnel towards the balcony for the guests to shoot at. If the pigeons survived, they would return to their pens on the hotel’s roof, their birthplace. The Pigeon Tunnel delves into the allegory by placing a heavy focus on the infancy of Cornwall and the relationship with his father, Ronnie, an infamous conman and overall shady person. The way this influenced Cornwall, to be raised by a father who was permanently on the lam, always chasing the highs and lows of swindling and making moves on the underground, is deftly woven by Morris into portraying how Cornwall became a perpetual double agent: As a son of a criminal with no past sent to a posh boarding school; as a spy of his father’s dealings while trying to keep away from following in his footsteps; and as a successful person trying to figure out if he actually owed anything to his estranged, now elderly father. Morris connects the upbringing of Cornwall to the making of le Carré, the poet of treason, and people with multiple identities, but an empty core. The results are poignant, particularly as Cornwall/le Carré never sounds bitter in his speech but also never nostalgic. This is a risky thing to say about someone who was literally a spy, but the tenor of his voice in the interviews is honest, first and foremost.

What was lacking in the documentary, and this is why I say that I would love to see a whole series of it, is Cornwall/le Carré, the political man. It is present in his experiences as an “embassy attaché” in Berlin, his infiltration of Communist groups in Oxford, and his awareness of the moral ambiguity of the side for which he played. But at the end of his life, le Carré was a staunch critic of the current state of the “Western World”, aiming his barbs at US and British foreign policy idiocy, the depravity of the banking system and the crisis of democracies. It’s clear in the works of the post-Cold War le Carré that he was as critical of its “New World Order” as he was appalled by Soviet brutality, that the fall of the Iron Curtain was less the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism of Fukuyama, and just the momentary success of Reaganomics and Thatcher’s diplomacy. Perhaps le Carré/Cornwall was not the right person to portray the grey men and women trying to accomplish minuscule victories for the Powers that give them orders. Still, he was the right raconteur to explain how we got to this place, back to the past le Carré warned us not to idealize like those pigeons. That is, perhaps, where Morris doesn’t close this loop of roofs, pens, and tunnels, the very personal and the big-scale history as shouldered by his subject.

Beware nostalgia be damned! Alberto Cox would’ve still wanted to be a le Carré-style spy in the 60s-70s (he would’ve become a turncoat).