Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Dry, nearly dusty, and moving so slowly that it might seem at first to be moving backwards, Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John Le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is fine and rewarding in the long run – but it is a very, very long run. Our “hero,” George Smiley, barely seems to be doing anything at all, investigating what I would consider a rather crucial lapse in security at MI6 with the armchair detachment of a retired gentleman picking away at the New York Times crossword. But this is part of the film’s strategy. Gary Oldman, playing Smiley, reserves his punch for those rare moments when George raises his voice above a bemused drawl, and the film functions in much the same way.

The film opens as Control (John Hurt, who has looked exactly this old for about thirty years) dispatches an agent to Hungary to make contact with a Russian informant who may know which member of Control’s top-ranked staff is, in fact, a mole. The Hungary job goes wrong, as anything called “the Hungary job” must, and the agent, Prideaux (Mark Strong, for once in a very long while not playing a bad guy), is shot. Control and his number one man, Smiley, are drummed out of the service – but a year later, after Control’s death, Smiley is engaged to work from outside the agency to uncover the mole.

Everybody got that? I didn’t; not really anyway. Beyond the basic setup (and, thankfully, the payoff), following Tinker Tailor’s many switchbacks and reveals proved a labour too intensive for me. I’ll give myself the benefit of the doubt and assume I’m not a dumb man, and that the fault therefore is in the film’s unwillingness to reinforce the investigative connections made as the plot unfolds, to aid people like, y’know, me: the ones who haven’t read the book, and therefore can’t map the dozen-strong cast, some of whom are referred to in name only for most of the film, to their respective faces. (I must shamefacedly admit that I thought “Karla” was one of the ladies in the secretarial pool on the second floor of MI6 until halfway through the picture, at which point I realized “she” is, rather crucially, someone altogether more important.)

We flash frequently back to a Christmas party long before the plot proper, where everyone in the agency plays nice with each other and makes love in the bushes and sings the Russian national anthem. It wasn’t until the third or fourth trip to this crucial social gathering that I knew who everyone was, and why their camaraderie (and betrayals) were relevant to the events in the present day. Fortunately, this mapping scheme does eventually give way to some recognitions and understandings, which must be how the film was planned to work – concentric circles of storylines and timelines which, after enough repetition, do finally fold us into the world.

This is a rigidly, nearly dogmatically, directed film, a real achievement in un-showy artfulness (if such a thing can exist). Tomas Alfredson exercises some of the finest control of composition and colour (this is a universe of “pale” – pale beige, pale grey, pale grey-green, pale buff) I’ve ever seen. His frames are strict, metric, and mathematical, not unlike the game of high-stakes chess George Smiley is playing against his KGB opponent, the mole in MI6, and (perhaps?) his own unstated ambitions. Longform gameplay abounds in the film, both within and without. Control scotch-taped photos of his inner circle of spies to chess pieces in his efforts to sort out which was the mole; Alfredson seems to enjoy moving them all around the board just as much as Control might have. As for Smiley, he’s the best player of the lot, in that we only realize the scope of the game he was playing once he sits triumphantly in checkmate.

Alfredson keeps a firm leash on his cast so that he can deploy their prowess at the appropriate moment and not a second before. There is a conversation in the middle of the film between Smiley and Peter Guillam, his investigative partner, in which Smiley tells a story that is significant both professionally and personally, which comes off like a hard clock to the jaw after all the subtler noodling-about that has taken place up to this point.

It’s a marvelous cast from top to bottom. It’s certainly one of Oldman’s best performances in his long and varied career, a high compliment, and Tinker Tailor also makes great use of Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, and Mark Strong (again, in the latter case, much of my pleasure is in seeing him not suited up in a space jumpsuit, wielding a yellow lantern). Tinker Tailor is also a further coming-out party for Benedict Cumberbatch, who between this, War Horse and the forthcoming second series of Sherlock is having a hell of a good month.

I liked Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy quite a lot and find that I can discuss elements of its construction at great length and with great enjoyment. Nonetheless I can’t tilt the lever all the way to “great” in my internal estimation of it, just because for all its craft successes, it seems to have dropped the ball on the storytelling to some degree, leaving spymaster neophytes like myself behind. Still, with patience, it’s a worthy read, and that final shot is simply grand.