"The Tailor of Panama"

The movie straightforwardly, almost offhandedly, paints Noriega as a Frankenstein's monster created by George Bush when he was head of the CIA and then dispatched when the general's rampant greed made him an embarrassment. It's typical of the movie's casual bluntness, its certainty that adults can take a cold-eyed, witty entertainment without having to be coddled. Boorman uses Panama as a sort of petting zoo for the moneyed corrupt. Noriega's gone but the wealthy are still getting rich from the schemes he presided over. These people know they're dirty, but their money and Harry's clothes, not to mention their own thimble-deep consciences, help them ignore the stench. But these are also the people whom Harry has to court and flatter in order to do his business. Any thoughts that this is going to be a story about reawakened ideals in the midst of corruption is given the kibosh early on. And in case we have any doubts, Boorman provides a juicy kicker: Brosnan's Osnard quotes the final line of "Casablanca" with a coolly cynical flip. The only beautiful friendships here are of the quid pro quo variety.

"The Tailor of Panama" doesn't have the coiled force of Boorman's last movie, "The General." It's a relaxed, dapper piece of gamesmanship and, as with every movie Boorman has made since "Hope and Glory," it reveals new talents while extending the themes that have always concerned him. Boorman has been skeptical for so long about the moral refinements Western civilization pretends to that he's way beyond being shocked by the corruption of the Panamanian ruling class.

There's a sly amusement, tinged with a faint repulsion, that Boorman hasn't shown before. He regards Harry's clients in something of the same way Luis Buñuel regarded the rich in his final films. And Boorman escapes the clichés that usually bedevil Western directors shooting in foreign locales -- he doesn't romanticize or judge. Where most directors would present beggars winding their way through stalled traffic, or people living in rooms that are practically on the sidewalk as Third World squalor, Boorman and his cinematographer, Philippe Rousselot, see teeming, and not necessarily hopeless, life.

Boorman must have been attracted to this material because it's a story about storytellers. The "artists" in his films, the people who set about bringing their visions to life, have been dreamers, wizards, thugs, bullshit artists. Harry Pendel's whole life is a story -- Cockney Jewish apprentice/arsonist posing as Savile Row expatriate. And he does something of the same for his clients with his flattery, helping them create the vision of themselves that they want to see. Harry is creating out of whole cloth in more ways than one.

And it's his yarn spinning, his flattering descriptions, that inspire Osnard to, in his reports, transform Mickie Abraxas (Brendan Gleeson, the star of "The General," in a sweaty, passionate, bearishly untidy performance) from a drunken former resident of Noriega's prisons to the leader of the silent opposition. Gleeson, along with Curtis and Leonor Varela, as Harry's right-hand woman Marta, give the movie some human weight. They're a reminder of the cost of the games Harry and Osnard are playing; the movie might seem too cynical without them.

At times "The Tailor of Panama" could use some more narrative drive, but Boorman's work with his cast couldn't be better. Brosnan so gleefully defaces his James Bond image that his performance is something of a shock. (At one point at the screening I saw, he uttered a crude euphemism for the female anatomy and you could feel the temperature in the room drop.) Osnard is a vulgarian opportunist at heart, and Brosnan embraces the character's grossness. He seems to be having a good time teasing the audience into waiting for a glimpse of Bond's suavity or sense of duty. It never comes and the self-satisfied smile on his face, the one that invites us to complicity in Bond movies, starts to feel like an affront, even dangerous.

Rush would seem to be all wrong for playing an ordinary man. Guinness was so good in "Our Man in Havana" precisely because he excelled at the madness of ordinary men. He conveyed it delicately, subtly. You get the feeling that had it been possible for Guinness to whittle down his acting to nothing more than the gleam in his eye he would have. Rush, on the other hand, is a showman. (That's why he was so good as the Marquis de Sade in "Quills.")

Rush makes that work for the part because Harry's job calls for him to be a showman, cajoling his clients. The poignancy of Rush's performance is in the way Harry sloughs off his willingness to please and begins to reckon the consequences of his actions, how he replaces false bonhomie with real heart. (The scenes between Rush and Curtis are some of the most authentic marital duets in recent memory.) Rush looks wonderful in his impeccably tailored suits, every crease and bend just right. "The Tailor of Panama" is about how Harry's surface elegance works its way inward. Rush makes it a perfect fit.

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