Hal Hinson

“In The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton attacks her role with the ferocious eagerness of someone who has spent the last few years pacing the sidelines, waiting for the chance to show her stuff. As Charlie, the eccentric actress who is used as bait in a honey trap…, Keaton is wired with emotion. It's been some time since an American actress has gone this far with a character. Nothing is held back; there's no protectiveness or hesitancy, and yet it's all in focus. The Little Drummer Girl is, at least in part, about an actress's attempt to be "real" in a situation where striking a false note would amost certainly cause her death. Keaton goes all the way in her identification with the danger of Charlie's pursuit of the real thing. Like Charlie, she acts as if her life depended on it.

“Keaton's performance in the film isn't exactly a revelation. In the movies she made with Woody Allen, Keaton turned her self-conscious neurasthenia into a seductive, comic style--neurotic chic. Later, in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and, especially, as Albert Finney's wounded partner in Shoot the Moon, she discovered something deeper in herself. As Faith, she was no longer a ditsy modern waif: Her head was impacted with dark, tangled emotions and, as her family crumbled around her, the sadness and resentment welled up inside her, rising to the surface like an ugly bruise.

“In The Little Drummer Girl, Keaton displays the same rawness and daring she showed in Shoot the Moon. Keaton isn't a polished technician like a number of modern movie actresses. Her acting isn't cool and tidy. At times, her style is clumsy and her thoughts seem hopelessly knotted up inside her head. But there's an immediacy to her screen work. In The Little Drummer Girl, she appears to discover her character's emotions just in the instant she steps before the camera, with their rough edges intact, and part of the excitement we experience from Keaton's performance comes from watching her fight through her awkwardness to get at what she's trying to express. She makes awkwardness a part of her style.

“… [D]irector George Roy Hill and writer Loring Mandel have made a few important changes in [LeCarre's] heroine…. Keaton's Charlie is American-born and not so young, and her experience in the world shows in the stray sprigs of gray in her hair and her droopy, melancholy eyes. Charlie isn't a soft, cuddly character with subtle, feminine wiles. She's aggressive, and not very easy to like. As an actress, Charlie is talented enough to claim most of the lead roles in… the tiny repertory company she works with in rural England, but the time in her career when stardom was still a possibility has passed, and she is more ambitious in her off-stage love affairs than in her work onstage. Charlie is sexually adventurous, but Keaton doesn't play her availbility to men as a sign of her modern, liberated attitudes. Charlie's seductive jousting with men is complex and double-edged--there's even some of the same compulsiveness and desperation in her come-ons that was visible in Keaton's earlier portrayal of Teresa [sic] Dunn in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In her scenes with Joseph (Yorgo Vogagis)… Keaton shows how much Charlie needs the approval of men. She uses sex, and the excitement of approaching a new man, in the same way she uses performing--as something to get her juices flowing and make her feel more alive, as a turn-on. [What a unusual use for sex!]

“Sex and acting are part of the same impulse for Charlie. They both stem from her drive to manipulate her emotions and put them on display. The same is true of her involvement in politics. The overlapping of politics and sex and theatre was at the heart of Le Carre's novel….

“The movie plays on the cliche that an actor's hold on reality is less than solid, and there is the suggestion that an actress's grip is even flimsier. . . . [Charlie] is a chameleon who takes on the coloration of whatever environment she's in. Her role-playing, both on and off stage, is so deeply ingrained in her personality that the truth about her own identity has become confused…. In the end, after she is unmasked as an imposter, Khalil asks her who she is. She replies, "Nobody. I'm nothing." When the performance is over, there is nothing left.

“Watching Diane Keaton as Charlie… , you may feel that the filmmakers are more successful in putting across Le Carre's story than they actually are….

“…. Keaton gives the routine, spy-thriller mechanics of The Little Drummer Girl a real, human center. But, outside her performance, the movie hardly exists at all.”

Hal Hinson
St. Louis, December 1984