Marching to a Muffled Beat

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL Directed by George Roy Hill Screenplay by Loring Mandel

The trouble with John le Carre's 1983 novel, The Little Drummer Girl, was that it required more than 400 pages of densely detailed writing to lend credence to an improbable plot that a writer less impressed by his own critical repute might have skipped through in about half that length. The trouble with the movie version of this tale is that it is entirely, and rather glumly, preoccupied with that labyrinthine plot. There is no time left in the film for those observations about character, setting and political background that at least gave the original fiction the force of caring craftsmanship and sober moral concern.

Like the book, the movie leaves the viewer trying to tamp down an ungrateful feeling of boredom and impatience. In recounting the story of how an unhappy and unsuccessful repertory actress named Charlie (Diane Keaton) is recruited and trained by an Israeli intelligence team to penetrate a Palestinian terrorist organization in order to kill its leader, Director George Roy Hill (The World According to Garp, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) matches Le Carre's heavy spirit. He is a careful workman who does an honest day's labor for an honest dollar, but he lacks the capacity to astonish or, it would seem, to inspire. If the audience is to become suspensefully and emotionally involved, it must be made to feel a certain ambiguity about Charlie. It must wonder if she really has enough emotional stability and enough skill in performance to sustain under deadly pressure the elaborate impersonation that the Israelis require of her. In other words, what is needed is Annie Hall's neurotic flightiness, or at least her actressy self-awareness. Instead, Keaton brings mostly a sort of put-upon sullenness to her part.

There is, similarly, no felt passion, political or otherwise, among the hit squad that controls Charlie or among its desperate opponents. So relentless are the obligations of this frenetic cast to the complexities of a story that involves locations in five countries, so tightly does Hill run his shuttle service between them, that there is no room for a particularizing word or gesture from anyone. The true subject here is the logistics of moviemaking, not the more wayward logic of history-tormented hearts and minds.

-By Richard Schickel