Pauline Kael

“At the start of The Little Drummer Girl, Diane Keaton is jittery and off-putting. As Charlie . . . she comes on strong and talks faster than anybody else. She's like someone on speed or on a caffeine jag: she responds to what people say before they've finished saying it. Then she's dissatisfied with what she hears herself rattling off, and before the words are out of her throat she half wants to take them back. The conception of Charlie is a modern cliché, a piece of psychobabble: she's an actress--i.e., a woman without a center, a flighty woman who feels empty and is looking for a role to play that will make her feel "real." But Keaton takes this conception so far that she gives it a painful, shrill validity. She doesn't do anything to make you like Charlie. Rather, she shows you this woman't avid attempts to be lovable, and she plays the part without creamy makeup: her dark, smudgy eyeliner and the pile of curls covering her forehead make her look flirtatious and anxious. It took me a while to comprehend that Diane Keaton was being off-putting because she was totally in character. Charlie is emotionally hungry. Smart and brazenly attractive, she's so miserably starved there's something wolfish about her. At the same time, she's trying to be tought--she's trying not to let herself be kidded. She's a jangled, poignant mess.

“…. [W]hen it becomes apparent that Kurtz's manipulation of Charlie's need for involvement and approval is the emotional center of the movie it isn't enough…. [T]he movie is too big to be a suspense story about the effects of violence on Charlie. There's a disproportion here. We see too many Israelis and Palestinians murdered for us to zero in on whether this wreck of a woman is emotionally destroyed or finds love--or both, which is what the ending suggests.

“Clearly, Diane Keaton's Charlie digs being center stage, but in the glimpses of here as Shaw's Saint Joan and as Rosalind in As You Like It she's peculiarly offhand and unemotional. Even an actress who's losing her youth and knows that she's not getting anywhere could have a little more showmanship; Charlie seems too flaccid a performer. As Keaton plays her, she's much more vivid and emotionally naked offstage. Klaus Kinski's Kurtz maneuvers her like a master puppeteer, and she responds gratefully…. Although Keaton works hard at it, there's no electricity between Charlie and the stolid, manly Israeli agent Joseph… Charlie doesn't seem to be the sort of woman to respond to a man who's like an oak tree with yearning, cow eyes. There's a lot more spark in the air when she's with Sami Frey, who plays Khalil . . . . [W]hen Khalil realizes that Charlie has set him up for slaughter his twisted smile at his own gullibility makes you feel what's missing from the role of Charlie. Frey makes direct contact with the audience in a way that Keaton doesn't until well into the second hour.

“A woman without a clear sense of identity is highly problematic as the protagonist-victim of a journalistic spy melodrama. Diane Keaton has, of course, played women with identity problems before; that was Annie Hall's trouble--she kept putting herself down, apologetically, and Keaton made a light art out of indecision, exasperated sights, eyes rolling upward. Charlie, though, isn't comic. She has all of Annie Hall's self-consciousness and self-doubt, and, yes, she's distrustful yet overeager. But it isn't charming flakiness; it's desperate flakiness--you can read the panic in her flickering expressions. And the character of Charlie, who, wanting to be a heroine, gets into a world of horrors beyond her imagining, is maybe too flaky to give the shallow picture substance and resonance.

“Keaton's performance starts clicking when Charlie is in the Palestinian camp and has to condemn an Israeli boy to death, and it snaps together in a shocking scene toward the end, when Khalil asks Charlie what she is, and she howls out what she feels is the truth about herself. Keaton takes you right into the core of Charlie's neurosis; she galvanizes the audience, and for an instant the movie seems to work. But the tense, abrasive Charlie doesn't have anything of the conventional heroine about her, and she's at odds with Hill's logical methods of storytelling. (If she were more conventional, she might fit into the movie better, but we'd forget the whole thing immediately.) Keaton leaps right over likability and crowd-pleasing--she's out there all alone doing something daring. Sometimes the performances we remember the most are the ones that threw us off initially; I wasn't prepared for Keaton's passionate immersion in her role. Her Charlie is a compulsive liar who keeps trying on styles and discarding them, looking for one that will convey sincerity; she winds up a compulsive truthteller. It's maddening that this performance can't carry the dead weight put on it.”

Pauline Kael
The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 1984
State of the Art, pp 257-260