Early in his new film “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Errol Morris creates one of the most vivid images of a career packed with them: a man in a suit walking through a meadow filled with mirrors. He’s always had a gift for finding specific and memorable visual metaphors for the stories he tells and the themes he’s drawn to; here, what’s noteworthy isn’t just the mirrors but the way the man keeps moving away from them. “I’ve led a lot of lives, in a way,” he says. “I don’t feel like I’ve belonged to any of them.”
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Two of those lives are defined and clarified from the beginning. As David Cornwall, he was a spy; as John le Carré, he was an author of bestselling spy novels. “The Pigeon Tunnel” was the title of his memoir, of which Morris’s new film is an adaptation; it was also, over and over, the working title for several of his novels, and the metaphor is explained early on, an observation of a haunting scene from his childhood, an image that haunted him for decades. Morris does several things at once, as he often does; he’s crafting a bio-doc, sure, but also an inquiry into the nature of fact and fiction and an exploration into the creative process that bridges them.
Like much of le Carré’s fiction, Cornwall’s life gets complicated — dizzying so, at times. He had a mostly unhappy and wildly unmoored childhood (“It’s not a lament,” he insists, “it’s just a self-examination”), a self-proclaimed “son of a swindler” whose dramatic stories of youth on the fringes and life on the run sometimes feel too good to be true; he is a storyteller, after all, and a self-aware one. “What’s the truth?” he asks pointedly. “What’s memory? There should be a word for the way we see past events that are still alive in you.”
Cornwall explains, with great insight, how a life of restless wandering led him to the world of intelligence and how that still wasn’t home for him: “I turned myself into one of them. But I never felt like one of them.” Such moments of self-reflection and ruthless analysis land with the kind of force and truth one can only muster this late in one’s life; in perhaps the most devastating section, he explains how much of his writing hinges on the idea of an “inmost room” where all the secrets and truths are kept, all with the awareness that, when you come down to it, “The inmost room is bare.”
Is the inmost room ourselves? Morris asks from behind the camera.
“In my case, yes,” he replies.
Cornwall says this not with regret or self-hatred; to the contrary, he almost seems pleased with this acknowledgment and that Morris is perceptive enough to tee it up. Early on, they discuss the idea of the subject/interrogator relationship, as it was explained to Cornwall in his intelligence work, but it’s clear they’re also talking about their own dynamic and their awareness of it. One of the pleasures of “The Pigeon Tunnel” is the rapport they build, a conversational and storytelling give-and-take that reflects their respect and interest in each other—a shift from the adversarial relationships typical of Morris’s single-subject documentaries and the kind of distance he had to keep between himself and Steve Bannon or Donald Rumsfeld (or, to a lesser extent, Robert McNamara).
Stylistically, Morris is working with his familiar tools, and that’s just fine; at this point in his career, after effectively creating the aesthetic of an entire subset of nonfiction filmmaking, he is under no obligation to reinvent the wheel. Cornwall is the only interview subject, but Morris illustrates his tale with archival footage and film and TV adaptations of his work, as well as such Morris trademarks as close-ups of his words on pages (so close you can see the pulp of the paper), handsomely staged dramatizations (not, it’s still worth clarifying thirty-plus years on, recreations), a gripping score (by Paul Leonard-Morgan and Morris’s frequent collaborator Philip Glass), and a dizzying array of coverage in interviews, some composed directly to camera.
What is truly, and thrillingly, new here is Morris’s thematic interest. The deeper he goes into the rabbit hole with Cornwall, the more his true subject becomes apparent, as the picture becomes a penetrating investigation of the idea that great artists freely use fiction to work through the very real pain of their own lives—even in work that’s not explicitly or even transparently autobiographical. “A writer’s task is to steal from his life,” the author explains, attempting to define his particular brand of larceny, illusion, and self-delusion. “I cannot define for you where reality goes through the secret door into fiction.” Morris, of course, knows that a tidy conclusion is less interesting than the groping search for understanding, and in its own quiet way, “The Pigeon Tunnel” feels like his most personal picture to date. [A-]