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[Ray de Galles]

Anyone watch this? I thought it was excellent and carried the obvious debt to le Carre very well.

I am troubled by the ending though. It seemed as if Worriker gave the Israeli report to the BBC himself so the PM was forced to comment on it rather than go ahead with the deal he himself had suggested of the government leaking it.

He still had the file at the airport and I thought putting it in the bin might have been a dead letter drop but it seemed too spontaneous for that.

So in the end he's got what Nancy wanted by publicising the facts of her brother's death but hasn't fulfilled Benedict's seeming dying wishes; expose the PM and protect the integrity of the intelligence services (presuming the reshuffling of them in to a Ministry for Homeland Security was still going ahead).

Anyone got a different take on it? There is at least one more film/play featuring the Jonny Worriker character that Hare is writing which may be a direct follow up on the same story or not but I think it will take some time to see the light of day.

[jeanmid]

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Incidentally wouldn't it be great of this genre was parodied, I mean seriously it is ripe for parody isn't it?

[tracteurgarcon]

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I thought it was excellent.

My take was that someone would find the file in the bin and it would end up being published when Jonny was safely out of the country.

Also were we supposed to think that Jonny was going to the place in the painting and that Nancy was going to join him at a later date having realised that was where he was heading? Or was that just my own romantic interpretation?

[RobW]

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I thought the ending was a bit of a damp squib, but then I always think that. I imagined that painting Johnny gave was a clue to where he was going. Looked like somewhere on the South of France (ok, clutching at straws) and Nice was one of the destinations he was looking at, so I put 2 and 2 together.

As an aside, Rachel Weisz still looks incredibly beautiful. I don't know why i'm surprised by this.

[Ray de Galles]

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If the painting was a clue to where he was going for Nancy to follow why didn't he just take her with him in the first place?

I took the departure board shot to be him deciding where to fly to on the spur of the moment.

[MsD]

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Why would someone as young, beautiful, clever and successful as her want to go out with some old duffer? I assumed that was a David Hare fantasy (of course young women don't want a man with a firm torso who can carry them down a beach, they want an old bloke who can teach them all about jazz). Enjoyed it apart from that.

[Ray de Galles]

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Weisz is, shockingly, 41. Do women of that age tend to be looking for "a man with a firm torso who can carry them down a beach"? If so, I need to have a word with my wife.

I'll admit though, I was troubled by the prospect of Weisz and Nighy hooking up and thought any sexual/romantic tension between them might have best been left unresolved (as always in TV) but then my wife and I realised the real life age gap between the two of them was exactly the same as between a couple we had been hanging out with at the weekend who seem very happy together.

[MsD]

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Oh, it's a particular bugbear of mine, but it happens a lot in film and TV, that they put an older man with a gorgeous younger woman as if this is entirely normal, as if people wouldn't mistake them for father and daughter. It doesn't happen that often in real life, except where the man is very rich or successful/famous. Even then, I'd wonder about the pool boy.

Even characters like Inspector Morse or Jack Frost were pulling birds twenty years their junior, which was ridiculous, IMO. They weren't even goodlooking, youthful older men, they were moany old gits.

Rachel Weisz has just married Daniel Craig in real life, which makes sense to me, although I realise people are attracted to each other for different reasons.

[MsD]

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btw, the film The Constant Gardener , which was on TV last week, also stars Weisz, Fiennes and Nighy (in a configuration of which I approve), and is very good, although depressing as hell.

[Ray de Galles]

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At least they balanced it out by having Weisz involved with an actor 16 years younger in her opening scene but, yes, her coupling with Nighy did succumb to cinematic cliche.

'The Constant Gardener' was indeed splendid and I'd completely forgotten Weisz won the Oscar for it.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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Harry Truscott wrote:

If the painting was a clue to where he was going for Nancy to follow why didn't he just take her with him in the first place?

I took the departure board shot to be him deciding where to fly to on the spur of the moment.

I thought he wanted to give her — and perhaps himself — time to consider. He'd had five marriages and I got the sense that any other long term relationship he wanted to be the last.

The painting, by Christopher Wood, might have been a clue. Wood died very young, most of his work — and certainly the best known — were coastal scenes of Brittany.

[Ray de Galles]

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I thought the only significance of the Wood painting is that she had instantly gone to the other one by him in Worriker's flat to admire it but he had been forced to sell that one.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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Possibly, I don't know. I do think we were left feeling their was an open-endedness there. Or maybe it was only thanks-and-goodbye sex for her, while he would continue to be insecure about his ability to sustain a relationship. But the painting felt like a bridge to a potential future for them should they want it.

Anyway, a nice little movie. I especially enjoyed Judy Davis's performance. She only had two key scenes, the one in the store room, and the climatic one in the restaurant. She has mobile features that are sometimes prone to giving away too much about her character, and possibly she did that in the store cupboard. Her restaurant bit was brilliant though, every twitch of every line on her face revealed a different layer of disdain, guilt, or fear. Excellent work.

[Wyatt Earp]

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It's not entirely unknown in real life, the younger-woman-with-older-bloke thing. But as MsD points out, in fillums it's pretty much the norm. For my money what's problematic isn't so much the idea that a younger woman might fancy an older man, so much as the idea, which is implicit, that only a younger woman might be fancied by an older man.

I thought it was a bit meh, the thing.

[Sundeporino]

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Both Mrs Rino and myself thought he hoped the file would be found and made public. Also that the picture was of Rio de Janeiro!
Crossing the channel doesnt seem far enough away.

[Ginger Yellow]

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How come this isn't on iPlayer?

[Ray de Galles]

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It was initially but I think the DVD came out on Monday in the UK so it's probably been pulled.

[Ginger Yellow]

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I finally saw it. I thought it started off strongly, and then kind of lost steam about half-way to two-thirds through. The big problem for me was that it was never very clear what the threat was. Was Worricker's life in danger? It was hinted at a few times - mostly to do with whether Benedict's death was suspicious. But then it was kind of dropped and it seemed like the only threat was losing his job. Which as spy thrillers go isn't particularly menacing. Similarly with the bag of cash - the fact that he wanted a large sum of cash suggested he was going on the lam and wanted to stay below the radar, but then he turns up at public events and goes to his ex-wife's home and buys plane tickets and so on. So why did he need cash in the first place? And the whole resolution was a complete anti-climax which didn't make much sense from a political point of view. Say he leaked the Israeli report without a deal with the prime minister. Are we supposed to believe that the UK government would have tried tp brush it under the carpet at that point? In practice, governments faced with unrefutable, public evidence of the cover-up of the murder of one of their citizens do not do that. Christ, simply being found out forging passports got the Israelis in an awful lot of diplomatic trouble. Frankly, the whole bollocks about "sometimes we have to speak the truth to our friends" was way, way less stern than I think the government would have been in real life.