After the exotic holiday atmosphere of the second film, Turks & Caicos, The Worricker trilogy concludes with Salting the Battlefield. Writer/director David Hare takes us back, literally, to where we started gradually, starting the action out in Europe, where former agents and lovers Johnny Worricker (Bill Nighy) and Margot Tyrell (Helena Bonham Carter) are on the run, before swinging the focus back onto England, then London and finally the claustrophobic confines of the spying community and the upper echelons of the UK government.
Familiar faces return – a heavily pregnant Felicity Jones as Worricker’s permanently angry estranged daughter Juliette, Saskia Reeves as Anthea Catcheside, the deputy prime minister wondering if her hour might be coming, Judy Davis as coiffed and suited MI5 boss Jill Tankard, Ewen Bremner as former spook and now “useful” journalist Rollo Maverley and Ralph Fiennes as Alec Beasley, a prime minister so convinced he has right on his side in every situation that David Hare might as well have called him Tony Blair.
Not forgetting Rupert Graves as Stirling Rogers, the public face of the Foundation run on behalf of the prime minister, and designed to give Beasley a political afterlife. Rogers, though not much of a character in terms of drama, is the nub on which the whole plot turns.
And Worricker’s task is to prove it – that Rogers is just a face and that the real force behind a Foundation intimately bound up in the illegal extraordinary rendition and torture that took place post 9/11 is none other than the UK’s prime minister.
He’s hoping to do it not with an exposé, but by giving Rogers (and by extension the PM) enough rope – by dropping hinting stories into the newspapers – and watching to see if either man will fashion a noose with it. It’s the cover-up not the crime that catches people out, Worricker explains to ballsy Independent newspaper editor Belinda Kay (Olivia Williams) when he finally arrives back in the UK for showtime.
Cat and mouse is the initial mood – Worricker and Tyrell on the run in Europe, evading capture, moving from one safe house or hotel to the next, switching countries, always half a step ahead. But Hare has evidently been watching the US reboot of House of Cards, which debuted in 2013, and he’s borrowed some of that style for a series of one-on-one scenes heavy with silken-tongued interchange. Judy Davis and Saskia Reeves get one early on, in which the spy boss effectively tells the deputy PM to stick with her if she wants to get the top job… without ever quite saying that. Brilliantly written and acted.
So it comes as a bit of a jolt with one scene out on the street, Worricker’s furious daughter and her errant dad having a proper ding dong, that maybe things have actually been a bit too silken for much of the film. The individual one-on-one scenes have been utterly gripping, but the connective tissue joining them all together has been a bit weak. Call it a plot, call it drama.
What Hare does get just right is the way politicians see the “top job” these days, ever since Tony Blair, as a stepping stone on to greater things – a gig at the UN or a “rapporteur” role in some other supranational agency.
The joys of Salting the Battlefield are in all those one-on-one scenes. Near the end of the 90 minutes we get the heavyweight bout with Judy Davis and Bill Nighy facing off, the pair of them signalling madly with a billion subliminal tics that everything they say is doublespeak, the actors as comfortable in their roles as their characters are meant to be.
And so it ends as it began in Page Eight. Dragon slayed? Not quite. Hare is not that naive. But the good fight has at least been fought. And as Johnny Worricker lights up a cigarette and heads out into the night while jazz parps away on the soundtrack three films’ worth of old-fashioned spook stuff come to an end.
Incidentally, the newspaper involved in flushing out the PM, The Independent, ceased production as a print entity within 18 months of Salting the Battlefield airing. That’s entirely appropriate. This has largely been an exercise in end-of-an-era nostalgia, print journalism being as much a relic of a bygone era as Tinker Tailor spycraft.
Salting the Battlefield, the final instalment of the Worricker trilogy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2021
