Streaming and on BBC Channels - John Baxter revives THE JOHNNY WORRICKER TRILOGY (David Hare, UK, 2011-2014)

'...a kind of perfect role", Bill Nighy

 A PARFIT GENTIL SPY.

            Given its failure to anticipate 9/11 and other disasters, the international intelligence community has clearly lost the plot. The problem may be the sheer number of people involved. Efficiency in espionage appears to be inversely proportionate to the number of agents.  Why else would East Germany, where the Stasi spied on everyone, fail to envision the fall of the Wall? 

            Spying is simpler in the cinema. Hardly had Tom Hanks and his busty assistants driven Russia from Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson’s War than he changed hats to become the lawyer in Bridge of Spies who saves Soviet agent Rudolf Abel from execution. Catch Hanks spending a decade tracking down Osama bin Laden. He’d have nailed him in an afternoon, with no more help than an adoring aide to keep the Martinis flowing.

            A similar thought appears to have motivated David Hare in writing and directing his trilogy of spy dramas about MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker, played by the imperturbable Bill Nighy. 

            Produced by the BBC, Page Eight (2011), Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield (both 2014) reduce espionage to the matching of skills among a handful of dedicated individuals. As in most spy fiction, winning or losing are abstractions.  Nobody believes the recovery of “the plans”, the exposure of the mole or the outwitting of Karla, Moriarty or Smersh will change anything. To Hare, as to his predecessors John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and John le Carré, it’s all about what Edwardians called The Great Game.

"a thuggish Ralph Fiennes"

            Like George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,  Worricker is the right-hand man of a dying boss, in this case Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), head of MI5. Almost on his deathbed, Baron entrusts him with a report on America’s clandestine “black sites” and the practice of “rendition”.  Page eight of the document reveals in passing that British Prime Minister Alec Beasley (a thuggish Ralph Fiennes) knows and approves of their existence. 

            Worricker exploits allies, lovers and family to authenticate the report and disseminate its contents.  He’s unconcerned that this makes him a fugitive from his own department, now run by Jill Tankard (a snarling Judy Davis;).  Should we be in any doubt as to where his true loyalties lie, the vicar at Benedict’s memorial service announces that Johnny has chosen the music, then leads the congregation in the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country.

            The last shot of Page Eight shows Johnny standing at an airport, contemplating a smorgasbord of possible bolt-holes.  His story could have ended there, had the popularity of the first film not induced the BBC to fund two more. 

            Turks & Caicos finds Worricker on that particular Caribbean haven for dirty money, eavesdropping on some post-9/11 profiteers who have become rich constructing the infrastructure of illegal imprisonment.  Pausing to take up again with old flame Margot (Helena Bonham-Carter), he sabotages their consortium and the secret fund set up to guarantee Prime Minister Beasley a comfortable retirement, then slips away with Margot just before the axe falls. 

            The third film, Salting the Battlefield – a reference to the practice of victors destroying the economy of the defeated by sowing their fields with salt - might have been better called The Morning After.  Flitting between German safe houses, Worricker is induced to return to Britain with Margot, only to find that his absence has barely been noticed. Jill Tankard now runs MI5 in cahoots with a thriving American intelligence industry, for which rendition and black sites are just weapons in the arsenal of freedom. Beasley has escaped censure by blaming the Americans, then resigning to become a well-paid statesman-for-hire on the model of Tony Blair. 

            Fortunately, Johnny’s enemies are compassionate in victory. He’s allowed to come in from the cold and return to his old office where he can play the Great Game while Tankard and Co. get on with the Greater Game of fighting international terrorism. 

            In all three films, Worricker has a female companion, and sometimes two. In Page Eight, he befriends Syrian publisher Rachel Weisz, the mysterious death of whose brother at the hands of the Israeli Army he’s able to elucidate. “I don’t suppose you’d let me thank you?” she says hopefully when they find themselves alone in a hotel room, but of course nothing so carnal would cross Johnny’s mind. If he were to share her bed, it would be with a metaphorical sword laid between them, a guarantee of knightly restraint. 

Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken

            The distressed damsel of Turks & Caicos is Winona Ryder, who, in a different kind of film and another era, would have been called a “moll”. With the connivance of a CIA man, played with loose-jointed glee by Christopher Walken (an actor Nighy greatly admires – “Every move he makes is a dance”), Johnny saves her, before escaping into the dark waters of the Caribbean with Bonham-Carter. (Whistle-blowing accountant Meredith Eaton would have been a more appropriate companion, though her height, a mere four feet, might have complicated the incognito on which Salting the Battlefield depends.)

             “British actors,” said Roger Ebert, “love playing gangsters as much as American actors love playing cowboys.” This is no less true of spy stories, and clearly Nighy enjoyed himself as Worricker.  Asked to describe his character, he said “I wear a dark blue overcoat. I smoke herbal cigrettes in the rain, I stand on Battersea Bridge in the dark and you have to worry about what I’m thinking. It’s a kind of perfect role.”  

            Why would a political writer like David Hare devote three films to something so close to escapism?  Did he, by exposing the aimlessness of espionage, hope to condemn by implication the secret gathering of information and those involved in it? Alas, in the wake of Wikileaks, this is old news.  We are now all too aware that strangers can watch our every move, hear every word.  “Aren’t you worried?” attorney Tom Hanks periodically enquires of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies.   We can only respond, like Abel, “Would it help?”   

Christopher Walken, Meredith Eaton, Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, on set