David Denby

“…. If a spy is by necessity an actor, a real actor might make a particularly effective double agent. His devotion to his role might overwhelm his sense of identity, which was tenuous to begin with; finally, he would have nothing of his "real" feelings to give away, and thus he would be especially hard to detect. Le Carre gave the theme an additonal twist: He made the actor a woman, and specifically a woman easily led by the men she falls in love with. The book is entrancing--le Carre's best, I think--but there's an unpleasant element in it, a layer of contempt, not only for convictionless actors but also for women, who are perceived as lacking the firm center, the iron sense of self, that is a man's.

‘George Roy Hill's The Little Drummer Girl is no better than competent and efficient, but it preserves le Carre's central ideas, so the picture is still fascinating…. A young actress of moderate talent who has pronounced left-wing, pro-Palestinian views, Charlie is a sort of minor-league Vanessa Redgrave, with an extremely active sex life. Having chosen Diane Keaton as their lead, Hill and screenwriter Loring Mandel have turned Charlie into an older American (with the same politics) who is acting in England, an actress who will never be a star. They just barely get by with the switch. The movie Charlie doesn't quite talk like an American, nor does she have the native incisiveness--the smart, bitter, slangy patter of the English left-wing dilettante--that made Charlie appealing as well as infuriating and glib. But Diane Keaton gives a taut, heartfelt performance. She has jettisoned the dithering charm, the adorable vagueness of her Woody Allen period and also the grating edge that emerged in the early scenes of Reds. She has her own style of incisiveness--brittle, taunting, ironic--that gives way fast to confusion and even helplessness when she is overmastered. And she's captured Charlie's peculiar sensuality--her easy surrender to men who can teach her something, men who have led the warrior's life. In bed with her lovers, she fondles their scars….

“Stranded much of the time, Diane Keaton still comes through. Her performance has the force of a confession: Charlie's desperate shuffling of identities, her grasping at opinions she hasn't quite made her own, her terrifying sense of vacancy are things that only another actress could fully understand. But if Diane Keaton has drawn on the self-loathing that builds up in her strange profession, she hasn't succumbed to it. She seems to assert that to play a role well one must possess extraordinary sensitivity to the feelings of others. Passing back and forth between Israelis and Palestinians, she vibrates in response to moral passions that are both mutually exclusive and unappeasable, and by the end she has become ennobled by her duplicity. She expunges whatever distate le Carre felt for the character; she turns the double agent without convictions into a moral heroine.”

David Denby
New York, October 29, 1984

“…. Charlie, easily molded by the men who attract her, is the kind of actress who doesn't have an identity of her own; she needs to play a role in life (as well as onstage) in order to fill up a sense of emptiness inside. Denounced as "a piece of psychobabble" by critic Pauline Kael [who also claimed Keaton gave it "a painful, shrill validity"], the theme made perfect sense to me. Actors, with their superior powers of self-projection, see themselves as committed to this or that moral cause; Keaton caught the mix of brazenness, voluptuousness, self-dramatization, and sheer talent at work in Charlie's impersonations. It was enjoyable to watch her play a smart woman who was essentially a fraud--her work had alertness and tension and a withering sense of the grounding of moral sentiment in vanity. Again, she followed the premise to its conclusion--by the end, Charlie was exhausted by her emotional commitment to what she only half believed.

Denby
"The Secret of Her Success"
Premiere, November 1988