The Tailor of Panama (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Perhaps you've seen some of Sir Carol Reed's movies. His specialty was the post-war spy fable filled with the corrupt and the corruptable, where most principles were, shall we say, flexible. His most famous is The Third Man, which brought Graham Greene's Harry Lime to cinema life as the most corrupt international schemer of them all. Nearly every documentary on cinema history features the famous conversation between Lime and his former college buddy on Vienna's Riesenrad, and Lime's famous rationalization of his corruption:

"In Italy for the years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of peace and democracy, and what did that produce? The Cuckoo Clock!"

D'oh!  

The Tailor of Panama movie is based upon precisely the same premise, but with layers of additional cynicism heaped upon it. The vacuum cleaner man is now a tailor with excessive debts and dark secrets in his past. He wants the money and he doesn't want his wife to know the secrets, so he goes along with the seedy MI-6 agent who approaches him. He agrees to supply info about the future of the canal.  He doesn't really know anything worthwhile from his tailoring conversations, so he tries to get info by examining his wife's documents (she works for the president). Finding this equally fruitless, he simply decides to tell the intelligence community what they want to hear.

The corrupt MI-6 agent, played to sleazy perfection by Pierce Brosnan, doesn't really care whether the information is good or bad, just how much of a career boost or a financial profit he can make from it. Up and down the line, nobody in the military and intelligence communities has any concern for the accuracy of their information. Even the guys who aren't in it for personal gain don't want the real stuff. They want the stuff that supports their ideology. 

The fictional details are interwound with real stories just as cynical, in order to support the film's cold eye. For example, CIA director George Bush built up Noreiga as the savior of the canal, a miscalculation so gross that President George Bush later had to invade the damned country to prevent his "savior" from becoming the drug kingpin of the hemisphere. The film effectively shows that Noreiga's claim to the throne was no more or less credible than that of the tottering drunk our poor tailor casts in the role! And like Bush with Noriega, the intelligence officers swear that the drunken stumblebum is their best bet, and is cast of truly presidential timbre, just the guy to keep the current Panamanian administration from selling the canal to the Chinese (another of the tailor's fantasies).

It's very funny in a Dr. Strangelove way, and it's just as clever an international thriller as anyone has made since ... well, since the cold war was still with us, and this stuff was actually important! The story is by John le Carre, the film is directed by the legendary John Boorman (Excalibur, Deliverance), Geoffrey Rush fills in nicely for Alec Guinness, Brosnan is deliciously slimy, and the ending is exactly what I hoped for.