Stanley Kauffmann

"The Tiny Drummer Girl"

“…. The casting in general is spotty and, at is center, it's deplorable. The best choice is Klaus Kinski as Schultz….

“Most of the other actors are, at best, passable. But the title role, the pivotal role, is played by Diane Keaton, and around her the picture collapses in tatters. She is so feeble, so inappropriate, that she underscores the dangers of Le Carré adaptation, the dwarfing of this book into just one more political thriller.

“Begin with the fact that Keaton is dressed and photographed poorly. It's only three years since she was in Reds, but she is made to look as if it were much longer. In that earlier political romance she gave her best performance; the director, Warren Beatty, brought her out of the casual hipness of her five Woody Allen films, brought her to fullness and conviction. In The Little Drummer Girl, Hill was apparently unable or uninterested to do the same with her. Back she goes to Woody Allen offhandedness, and out the window goes Le Carré’s heroine.

“In every sense Keaton gives a slurred performance. Her speech is slurred in a way that makes Saturday Night Live sound like the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. And her speech is typical of everything else she does. She seems to slur on to the screen and off it; she slurs her feelings, her very presence, in a way that matches her throwaway speech. Very early she supplies a moment that virtually wrecks the rest of the role. She is supposed to be an American actress playing Shaw's Saint Joan with an English company. The few lines of hers that we hear are sub-high school, yet Schultz, who is in the audience, is convinced that she is the actress he needs for a play he has in mind. Keaton's weakness as the actress she plays, let alone in her own acting, undermines Le Carré’s main and fascinating idea.

“…. (A hint of Vanessa Redgrave, superb actress and Palestinian zealot, hovers behind this woman in the novel.)…. Le Carré… wants to dramatize some relatively abstract aspects of a terrible reality; and at the center of the dramatization he puts--of course--an actress. She thinks she believes in one side, but as an actress she can put the truth of her acting at the service of the opposing side. In this seeming eqivocation, Le Carré sees the grim symmetry of the opposing sides…. [A]s the story's crowning metaphor, just as the two forces are fighting each other here on foreign, neutral terrain, so the two forces are pitted within this one woman who ends up neutral, believing in neither side.

“What the role needed was a Redgrave, ten years younger, someone within whose being all these immediate matters and their amplifications could resonate, someone who could crystallize the ironies of falling in love with an Israeli who enacts a Palestinian in their affair so that she can later convince the true Palestinian with whom she will have an affair. Keaton, however, looks and behaves like not much more than a veteran subscriber to Rolling Stone. When she is lured to her first meeting with the Israeli contingent and they propose their plan to her, her wispiness makes them look foolish for choosing her. With exactly the same script, with every sequence and all the same other actors, this film would hold more of Le Carré if the Drummer Girl herself were adequate. Here his book is shriveled, not condensed, because Keaton is so small.”

Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic, date?