From left, Alexander Skarsgård, Florence Pugh and Michael Shannon in The Little Drummer Girl.
The cynical spymaster. The moral ambiguity. The sexual allure of the handsome fanatic. The betrayals. The tension. The forging of documents and of identities. The melancholy that comes with all that deceit. Those are the crucial elements of a great, old-fashioned espionage tale.
They are all there in the excellent BBC/AMC adaptation of John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (starts Monday AMC, 9 p.m. and runs through Wednesday with three two-hour episodes). It’s a gorgeous-looking, taut and slow-burning thriller, vastly entertaining and thoughtful in its approach to what it is about.
What it’s about in the gripping surface story is catching a terrorist killer. It opens in 1979 in West Germany and a bomb is delivered to an Israeli attaché. It doesn’t kill him but his young son is brutally blown apart. The bomb is delivered by a smiling young woman wearing a summer top, miniskirt and boots. The attaché looks at her and is off his guard. The last he sees of her is her smirk as she is driven away. The driver is a Palestinian named Khalil.
The Little Drummer Girl is a gorgeous-looking, taut and slow-burning thriller.Jonathan Olley
Florence Pugh plays Charlie, a young actress toiling to learn her trade on the fringes of London theatre.Jonathan Olley/AMC/Ink Factory
Entering the aftermath is Martin Kurtz (played with great gusto by Michael Shannon), the head of a team of Israeli spies working to find Khalil (Charif Ghattas) and others like him, and stop them. Kurtz quickly figures out Khalil’s modus operandi – he recruits an attractive young woman to carry out the killing deed. He decides to do the same. It is a matter of finding a young woman to work for his side, infiltrate Khalil’s group and, hopefully, help destroy it.
Recruiting a spy, especially someone from the civilian world who might be capable of the task, is a complex act of seduction, persuasion and training. Kurtz and his team decide that the preferred agent to recruit is one Charlie (Florence Pugh), a young actress toiling to learn her trade on the fringes of London theatre. She’s strong-willed, self-assertive and has principles. All that needs to happen is a successful seduction.
That seduction is carried out with impeccable but doleful precision by Becker (Alexander Skarsgard, perfectly cast), when Charlie’s actor group takes a holiday in Greece. Becker presents himself as a handsome, mournful soul and Charlie is intrigued. From the get-go, mind you, it is clear that Charlie has a valid suspicion that Becker has been tracking her for a while and that whatever he says is probably a lie.
But Charlie is an actor, wants to be a good one and the idea of role-playing matters deeply to her. How innocent is she? That question is at the heart of what becomes the undertow to the series. There are no innocents here, really. There are only people who want something and they will do heinous acts to get what they want. When Becker delivers Charlie to Kurtz, the spy master beams. “I am the producer, writer and director of our little show,” he says. Charlie will be the star and it’s a meaty role and, well, it’s what she’s always wanted.
Becker (played by Alexander Skarsgard) is tasked with seducing Charlie when her actor group takes a holiday in Greece.Jonathan Olley/AMC/Ink Factory
What follows is an elaborate construction of fiction. The Little Drummer Girl is as much about the preparation for the climactic final act as it is the climax. It is about cultivating and overcoming paranoia, as all the best works of espionage are. Kurtz, with his implausible plan, is sometimes a risible figure. And yet, as le Carré’s original novel asks, isn’t there something laughably implausible about the construct of fiction that inspires both patriotism and terrorist acts?
Like the BBC/AMC adaptation of The Night Manager from two years ago, this one is directed with lavish, intense style by the South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook. He manages to make the 1979 setting both deeply alluring and unsettling. In fact there is a great deal of unsettling mood being established. The action shifts constantly, at first, from London to Germany, then to Greece and Israel. There is a lavish look to it all and yet the viewer is meant to realize that in all these beautiful places there are truly appalling people carrying some malignancy. Kurtz may have a righteous cause but what he is constructing, with Charlie as the fulcrum, is monstrous.
Florence Pugh as Charlie is a marvel to behold. Her sheer verve is the gripping centre of this explosive thriller. (If you want to see more of her work she’s stunning as a ravenous and murderous Victorian wife in the movie Lady Macbeth, currently on-demand.) And it is equally a marvel to see old-school espionage technique dramatized with great impact. The series is set in a period before cellphones and digital technology. There is no razzle-dazzle. Just spies carrying out their dangerous, predatory work, and you’re beguiled, utterly.