The Tailor of Panama

In a place this treacherous, what a good spy needs is a spy of his own.

In this seductive spy thriller based on the best-selling novel by John Le Carre, Academy Award®-winner Geoffrey Rush (Shine) delivers a dazzling performance as Harry Pendel, an ex-con turned tailor to the rich and infamous and married to smart and sexy Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis - True Lies), Directed by Academy Award®-nominee John Boorman (Hope and Glory, Deliverance) and set in steamy Panama, where nothing is what it seems, Andy Osnard (Pierce Brosnan - The Thomas Crown Affair), a suave and ruthless British spy, entices Harry into eavesdropping on the powerful politicians he clothes. But Harry's talent for storytelling compels him to weave an elaborate tale that's not only taken as truth, but sets off a chain of events that threatens to destroy everything he treasures most in life.

AMG Plot: Set amidst the controversy of the handover of the Panama Canal from Panama to America in late 1999, this espionage thriller follows seductive British spy Andrew Osnard (Pierce Brosnan), who has found himself recently banished to Panama. When Osnard stumbles into a tailor shop, he meets Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a garrulous sort with an unmatched penchant for "fluence" — that is, fabricating wild tales with real-life details. Osnard threatens to expose his shady past, until Pendel agrees to provide him with information about the political situation in Panama. Pendel's wife Louisa (Jamie Lee Curtis) tries to remain unscathed by her husband's constant follies, which escalate and put him in the midst of international discord, while also threatening the shaky relationship between himself and Osnard, who cannot escape each other's grasp. Based on John le Carré's popular 1996 novel, the film also features Catherine McCormack, David Hayman, and young Daniel Radcliffe, who completed this film before his starring role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, released later in the year.

AMG Review: Based on John Le Carré's book The Tailor of Panama, this is a very fine and altogether rare movie -- a satire too realistic to play for belly laughs and too giddily self-aware and subversive to make a routine spy thriller. It also benefits mightily from some very sharp work by Pierce Brosnan and the presence of Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush. Spying, as co-screenwriter Le Carré has observed, is a squalid business, and it's a credit to director and co-writer John Boorman that so much of Panama's seediness (drug dealers, corrupt bankers, and bought politicos) fits onscreen. Known for serious movies like Deliverance and Hope and Glory, Boorman gives the movie a sweaty, gleeful, sexual edge and pays proper homage to sources like The Man in the White Suit and Our Man in Havana. Another surprise is Brosnan, who ferociously plays British spy Andrew Osnard as a Bond turned inside out, bankrupt of idealism and discipline, all libido and unerring instinct for vulnerability. It's a ferocious performance that shows just how far from 007 Brosnan can go. And Rush makes his character Harry Pendel a jittery collection of contradictions. Credit him for stitching into the character so many threads of weakness, decency, love, courage, mendacity, sweet naivete, and sad cynicism without once rending him.