Film reviews: The Pigeon Tunnel | Sumotherhood | Cassius X: Becoming Ali | The Miracle Club | Daliland
The Pigeon Tunnel (12A) ***
Sumotherhood (15) **
Cassius X: Becoming Ali (12A) ****
The Miracle Club (12A) **
Daliland (15) **
“It’s the joy of self-imposed schizophrenia that the secret agent loves,” smiles John Le Carré in the new Errol Morris documentary The Pigeon Tunnel. That’s about as illuminating as the late spy author, born David Cornwell, allows himself to be in this final interview, shot shortly before he died in 2020. Morris, who has untangled such knotty subjects as Robert McNamara (The Fog of War) and Donald Rumsfeld (The Unknown Known) seems to know he’s met his match in the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy author, who turns the tables on him right out of the gate by asking Morris questions about who he is and what is intentions are. When Morris later confesses he might not have pressed him hard enough, Le Carré smiles and, in a deliciously triumphant way, reassures Morris that he’s squeezed “the last drop out of the sponge”, knowing full well he’s remained thoroughly in control of his own story.
But that’s also part of the film’s appeal – watching Le Carré’s performance as he dishes out well chosen anecdotes, mostly about his relationship with his rapscallion father, Ronnie Cornwell, a con artist whose duplicitous nature his son appropriated with more noble intent, first in the security services, then in his career as a writer who “wants to take tidy stories out of the perceived reality around me.” The title comes from a phrase Le Carré himself used as the working title for every one of his books (and eventually for his own memoir). It dates back to a childhood experience with his father in Monte Carlo and involves a hotel that bred pigeons for shooting. The grim image that he goes on to describe has always functioned for him as an overriding metaphor about people never being quite being able to escape who they are, which perhaps goes some way to explaining the divided nature of his own identity.
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Hide AdCut together with clips from various Le Carré adaptations, the film may expose the limitations of Morris’ particular interview style, yet there is one quietly revealing moment late on when Le Carré proclaims himself “an artist” – a term he rarely used, possibly because the literary establishment rarely ascribed it to him as a writer of genre fiction, even genre fiction that has arguably transformed the way we think about the world.
Sumotherhood co-writer/director/star Adam Deacon’s past mental health troubles have been well documented, not least because they derailed the one-time Bafta Rising Star winner’s career after he broke through in urban drama Kidulthood and made his own parody version, Anuvahood, in 2011. Now he’s back with a sequel to that film and, to his credit, he doesn’t shy away from the bi-polar diagnosis he’s been very public about dealing with. Indeed, he channels it into an intentionally manic action comedy in which his hapless London hustler Riko is given to wild bouts of outrageous behaviour whenever he’s off his meds – a condition that’s making his and his best friend Kane’s efforts to come up with the £15,000 they owe some criminals even more challenging (Kane is played by co-writer Jazzie Zonzolo).
But while there’s no doubting the film has plenty of energy, it’s such an odd mix of tones it becomes exhausting to watch. Maybe if Deacon had just focused on making the low-budget British version of Bad Boys he clearly wants it to be, it would have worked a little better. But having Jeremy Corbyn interrupt a bank robbery and Ed Sheeran cameo as a homeless guy defecating on the grounds of a private school makes the film seem like some bizarre sketch-show Christmas special, something reinforced by the last-minute appearance of Jennifer Saunders as a gun-toting cop.
Charting the tumultuous five-year period in which Muhammed Ali rose from being a talented and charismatic amateur boxer called Cassius Clay to the politically controversial heavyweight champion of the world, Muta’Ali’s documentary Cassius X: Becoming Ali – based on Stuart Cosgrove’s book Cassius X: A Legend in the Making – offers a clear-eyed account of this formative period in Ali’s storied (and much-pored-over) biography. This is the period in which he privately underwent a spiritual and political awakening via his tumultuous friendship with Malcolm X and involvement with the Nation of Islam while the American media simultaneously built him up (at least initially) as sporting hero in a country that didn’t even allow him to eat in the same restaurants as his promoters. The film strikes a good balance between the development of both his boxing and his politics – and watching archival clips of Ali is always a joy.
The only miracle in The Miracle Club is the ability of Laura Linney, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith to elevate this gentle Irish period drama into something vaguely watchable. Set in 1967, Linney plays a woman returning to her hometown for her mother’s funeral after emigrating to America 40 years earlier under mysterious circumstances. Her arrival opens old wounds among her mother’s friends (Bates and Smith), but when a plot contrivance sends them all on a bus trip to Lourdes, reconciliation isn’t far behind.
Dalíland serves up disappointingly dull late-period biopic of the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, with Ben Kingsley as the extravagant artist and Barbara Sukowa as his wife and business manager Gala. It’s set largely in New York in 1974, during one of Dalí’s annual residences in the St Regis Hotel, but sadly American Psycho director Mary Harron (returning to territory of her debut film I Shot Andy Warhol) doesn’t really have the resources to recreate this time in a compelling way.
The Pigeon Tunnel streams on AppleTV+ from 20 October; Sumotherhood, Cassius X: Becoming Ali, The Miracle Club and Daliland are in cinemas from 13 October