‘The Night Manager’ Premiere: Do You Have to Love le Carré to Like This Show?
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Version 0 of 1. Before starting to recap tonight’s episode, I feel compelled to confess: I’m not a John le Carré expert. I’m no stranger to his work, of course. I’ve spent long car rides in the company of George Smiley. I’ve admired Alec Guinness in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.” But these experiences date back almost to the end of the Cold War — and le Carré is the sort of author who often inspires lifelong devotion in his readers. (Like the creators of “Homeland,” for example, who are conversant enough with his books to nimbly sprinkle bits and pieces of quotes into their scripts.) And so, I’ve worried: Would I be able to write for viewers who might know passages of “The Night Manager” by heart? After viewing tonight’s episode, I’m relieved to say that coming to AMC’s new series with fresh eyes may not be so bad after all. Le Carré purists may well be frustrated by liberties taken with this reinvention of the 1993 novel. But as a contemporary spy tale, taken on its own merits, the show is deeply appealing, and in substance and style, for this viewer at least, moved the book forward in a number of fortuitous ways. We fast-forward in time, from the period of the first Persian Gulf war to the Arab Spring, before settling in 2015. We swap a man for a woman in the role of Angela Burr, a high-ranking agent with the mysterious, quasi-renegade International Enforcement Agency in London. But on a deeper level, we also move from a 20th-century spy narrative, whose female characters exist as refractions of the ebb and flow of male desire — two beautiful mistresses of powerful men share “a jeweled brilliance and a kind of dressed nakedness”; the older woman working at the reception desk of a hotel turns pink “like a menopausal groupie” — to something that feels a great deal more contemporary. In the show, we get, in our night manager, Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston), a handsome former soldier who would be somewhat Bond-like were he not constantly fighting for his authority and erotic edge. He moves stylishly and fearlessly through the chaos of Cairo in Hosni Mubarak’s final hours of rule, adrenaline keeping him calm as he tells a frightened colleague, “I’ve seen worse,” and deadpans into the phone, “I have several guests extremely keen to leave.” And yet, however self-assuredly sexy he is by day, he turns into a picture of obsequiousness by night: a “changing of the guards” remarked upon by his soon-to-be lover, Sophie Alekan, the mistress of the powerful, corrupt and bratty Freddie Hamid. Sophie, I’ll venture somewhat timorously to say, ups her game a bit in her new screen incarnation. In the novel, she is purely a distillation of male disgust and desire: “Before Freddie came along she had belonged to a rich Armenian, Jonathan remembered, and before that an Alexandrian Greek,” Mr. le Carré writes. On screen, she names that role herself — “The Hamid family owns half the city and Freddie Hamid owns me” — and has at least some measure of erotic agency. She owns her choice of Jonathan as her confidant and would-be savior for reasons that go beyond his proximity to the British government: “You look fine by daylight.” She pushes to establish some status for herself before inviting him into her bed. “Make me a coffee, would you, Mr. Pine?” she challenges him. (In the book, a waiter does the work. Pine tries, and fails, onscreen to resist. ) “Sit with me,” she orders. “Do it for me, please,” she requests by the copier, turning an intelligence share into a hotel clerk’s chore. Jonathan plays along with considerable pleasure, stroking the phone before picking up for her later call for a cocktail; referring her to the in-room minibar, pushing her to say “I want you” before showing up with a tray. In the end, Sophie does, to put it mildly, get the short end of the stick. But along the way, we get a far more entertaining cat-and-mouse game, with far more female interiority and male vulnerability, than this type of spy story has traditionally delivered. The screenwriter David Farr and the director Susanne Bier’s Richard Roper feels like a man of our time as well: a venal businessman who dabbles in global good works and has a keen appreciation of brand management. As Roper, Hugh Laurie’s predatory gaze is perfect; a problem, however, is that the actor is also instantly likable — a challenge that may complicate establishing and sustaining Roper as “the worst man in the world” over the coming five episodes. Even the otherwise vengeful Jonathan seems to look at Roper with fascinated attraction. Their push-pull power game under the Alpine stars recapitulates some of the back-and-forth with Madame Sophie in Cairo. “You know, a lot of people would have tossed that cigarette away when the paying customer turned up,” Roper tells Jonathan, after an evening of searching looks at the fussy, and yet not-quite-devoted, night manager. “Good for you.” Jonathan keeps smoking; let’s hope there’s a good bit more of this to come. Unfortunately, I’m already tired of Roper’s mistress, Jed Marshall, the feral American with equine legs and a determined need to strip and shock as often as possible. There’s bound to be more of her to come. Let’s hope she learns to use her words. I hope there’s more coming, too, from Lord Sandy Langbourne and his wife, Lady Caroline, the former ski champion now dragging around with Roper’s band of nasty men. (“Knees gone, poor old thing. Completely worn out.”) I find them promising. I’m curious to know if others agree. |