The Drummer Girl

 

I’m clearly coming late to the party, when everybody and their mum knows who Florence Pugh is but me.  I didn’t see her in Little Women – which probably got Greta Gerwig the greenlight for Barbie.  I haven’t seen a single picture in the Marvel superhero universe.  I didn’t have a clue that Cooking With Flo has 52K subscribers on Instagram.  And last but not least, I haven’t brought myself to sit through Oppenheimer, in spite of my admiration for Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders, and my fascination with the Manhattan Project.  So, watching Florence in the six-episode BBC adaption of The Little Drummer Girl (released in 2018, six years ago, already) was eye-popping.  She may be the hottest thing since sliced bread, as an influencer, but she took that part in her jaws, and shook it like a big cat.  It wasn’t one of those things where the actor is chewing up the scenery, not in service to the script, it was an actor completely inhabiting the character, no light between the cracks.  Florence was so much Charlie, in all her random willfulness, her hesitations and her fury, her heart on her sleeve, her transparent pretense, that you couldn’t keep up.  Charlie kept you guessing, Florence kept you guessing.  There was no disguise; it was all disguise.

A word about the story, and Charlie’s place in it.  The Little Drummer Girl is my favorite le Carré, and I think his most skillful book.  It has that extraordinary opening, the terror bombing in the Bonn suburbs.  “Sooner or later, they say in the trade, a man will sign his name.”  And then the introduction of the relentless Kurtz.  Charlie seems like a device, in the novel, a kind of Vanessa Redgrave avatar.  In the 1984 movie, which fails mostly because it’s compressed into a two-hour runtime and doesn’t have enough breathing room, Diane Keaton plays to Charlie’s naiveté, which isn’t wrong, exactly, but it’s not enough.  Charlie is brittle, a shell of defense mechanisms, and her handlers break her, and then remake her in her own image.  That’s the biggest trick, or narrative reversal, that Charlie isn’t an empty vessel, who’s filled – or fulfilled – by her mission.  She’s already waiting in the wings, her role is only waiting to be cast.  The reason the mini-series works, and the reason Florence Pugh works so well as Charlie, is that everybody seems to understand the meta aspect of this.  Charlie isn’t acting the part, she’s reimagining herself.  It’s her audition for the theater of the real, but as Gadi Becker tells himself at the end of the book, the last thing he wants is to invent somebody. 

There was a lot of huffing and puffing, when the book was first published, because people took issue with le Carré’s sympathies.  Or what they assumed were his sympathies.  And that, of course, depended on what theirs were.  The book describes an Israeli deception operation – but for our Charlie’s recruitment to work, it’s the Israeli spy-runner, Gadi, who voices Palestinian grievances.  This doubling effect mirrors Charlie’s conflicted inner discipline.  The end public result, though, was that reviewers got their panties in a bunch.  If you had sympathy for the Palestinians, you thought the book was an apology for Israeli violence; if you sympathized with the Israelis, you thought the book was an apology for Palestinian terror.  The idea that le Carré was trying to give voice to both, in an intractable, Biblical struggle, was lost.

I don’t think the struggle is any less intractable; if anything, given Bibi Netanyahu’s worst instincts, it’s even more so.  (It has to be said that le Carré’s political sympathies were very much not in support of the Arik Sharon scorched-earth philosophy.)  On the other hand, after the October 7^th attacks, and in the wake of the pretty much complete collapse of Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, is it possible we might actually see some daylight?  I don’t know.  My point in writing this piece is only that the newer, more extended version of The Little Drummer Girl is an adult entertainment.  It’s not simple-minded, it’s ambiguous.  I admire the impulse of the people who made it, who clearly thought the time was right, and got the right people on board to make it happen.  It’s hard enough, these days, God knows.  I salute the effort.