Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

source: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

This is one of those films in which everybody looks at everybody else deeply meaningfully, to convey a story that by now lacks both originality and interest (who is the mole in the organization?! wowee!). The characters even walk slowly and purposefully to ensure you realize they're involved in something terribly significant. Every small step of the plot is unfolded with the kind of heavy handed, overblown technique so beloved of the pretentious auteur directors of the 1960s. I thought they didn't make them like this any more, but unfortunately I was wrong. I'd like to give such an obviously high quality cast and production team the benefit of the doubt; that they caught me in a bad mood on a bad day. But when you see even railway trains overacting you have objective evidence that you're watching a film whose makers think they're a darn sight smarter than they really are. One cutaway shows a portion of railway track switching — presumably symbolism that someone in the story just got the point (geddit?). I'm sorry I couldn't like this one better; it is meant to give us a realistic view of the tedious but dangerous business of cold war spying. But it takes ponderous, pretentious movie making to new heights. Perhaps we should put it on the record as the first film in which the techniques of method acting are extended to infest everyone concerned, right down to the chief grip.

Freezing. John Le Carre's spy story has a new version. Tomas Alfredson the Swedish director of the chillingly great "Let The Righ On In" understands the British climate. Impersonal raincoats wore by the very personal Gary Oldman are only part of the story. An undercurrent of passionate wheelings and dealings with poker face players makes for an engrossing tale that allows us some kind of distance. The production design is a masterpiece on its on. Just look at the wallpapers. I'm not going to venture into the actual plot but the performances. Gary Oldman is superb in a slightly younger and more virile version of Alec Guinness who played George Smiley in a celebrated British miniseries in 1979. Colin Firth's bisexual turn brings a dark sort of lightness to the proceedings. Tom Hardy is also superb as are Mark Strong and John Hurt. If you're a Le Carre fan you'll be enthralled, if you're not you may become one.

The acting was first-rate. The adaptation was horrible. There are so many holes in the plot I felt as though I missed the first 15 minutes of the movie......you know, the part where we're supposed to see the birth of the story line and some character development. Anyone who wasn't already familiar with the book would be completely lost. It's like I was watching part 2 of a two-part miniseries without having seen part 1. It was beyond disjointed. Did Cirian Hinds even have any lines in the movie?? He was in scene after scene but I don't remember him saying anything. In any case, I was hugely disappointed in this film. The BBC miniseries with Alec Guiness is vastly superior.

The first episode of the BBC series sets the tone perfectly, introducing the key players and telling us what kind of people they are, all by just having them enter a room for a meeting without saying a word. The trouble with the movie version is that we never get the chance to know the characters. They are faceless people with difficult names and we don't care which one of them is the bad guy. I have read the book at least three times, seen the TV series twice and was still totally confused by the movie. Anyone who hasn't read the book, I would suggest, doesn't stand a chance. The grimy landscape around the Hotel Islay was nicely done. But why make every scene grimy? Where was the circus? Where were the lights of Shaftsbury Avenue? Where were the green fields around Jim Prideaux's prep school? The key scene with Connie Sachs is destroyed by a totally out-of-place crudity and the climax, when the mole is revealed, is thrown away with zero drama. What was going on?

I really wanted to enjoy this film. I watch the 1979 TV series at least once a year and was looking forward to a new, dark, edgy take on a well-loved story. I was very disappointed. First, the plot is mashed up (for example Ricki Tarr, who should set Smiley's mole hunt in motion, does not appear until the half-way point). Secondly, characters are not developed and even altered (Percy Alleline is a peevish bully, rather than an over-promoted pompous buffoon who has been suckered into giving the KGB a pipeline into Western intelligence, and Peter Guillam is fashionably gay). We don't even get any sense of Bill Haydon's motivation to turn double agent apart from a throwaway line about the West being "rather horrible". Colin Firth does make more of Haydon's frustration at working for an increasingly impotent power - Britain - when he wants to make a mark on History and therefore turns to a more dynamic force which he believes the USSR to be. There is no suspense in the key scenes where Peter Guillam steals a top secret file from the archives, or even in the revelation of the mole. What Hitchcock could have done with these sequences! One scene which did work for me on a symbolic level was the Christmas party. This is original to the film but does suggest how the British intelligence service (and, by implication, Britain itself) has become lazy and hedonistic, and is losing its grip. Gary Oldman totally fails to capture George Smiley's self-deprecating intelligence. We get no indication of Smiley piecing together a jigsaw and realising what the 'Witchcraft' project really means. Film-makers often confuse British reserve with unemotional stolidity, and Oldman walks straight into that trap. The cinematography looks good, with shadowy interiors suggesting the claustrophobia of the world of espionage, but the design for the Circus HQ is all wrong - it is not a huge open-plan office, but a series of small, seedy little rooms. All in all this was a huge disappointment. I came straight home from the cinema and put the BBC series back into my DVD player.

I know my limits. I just couldn't follow the plot of this labyrinthine movie adapted from John Le Carre's novel, which had previously been made into an award-winning BBC TV series with Alec Guinness as spy-catcher George Smiley. That itself had been a multi-part production but here the action, or should that be inaction, is condensed into a still lengthy two and a half-hour film. It seemed that every time I picked up a plot thread, it led me down an inconclusive side-road with no real drama at any point. Even the revelation of the mole in the British Secret Service was delivered unspectacularly, in keeping with the dogmatic realism of the rest of the narrative. Plot-lines circle round and turn in on themselves but ended up only dizzying my perceptive powers. The cream of contemporary British acting talent, old and young, pretty much is the whole cast but I didn't get any sense of the actors really inhabiting their parts. Gary Oldman's playing is very much in the shadow of Guinness and no-one else distinguished themselves in my eyes. They may have been in the book, I guess but strange scenes, like Smiley taking a constitutional swim in a public place or the Secret Service office party, just sort of occur, although to what end I'm not entirely sure. Apart from hearing the odd stray song on the soundtrack or sighting a vintage car in the streets, I hardly got the impression that this was the 70's at all. There were no news inserts or political issues to reference the times, leaving the story to unfold in a musty, grey netherworld, vaguely Kafka-ish in tone. Which may well have been the point. All I know is this film failed to connect with me at all and was a major disappointment for this particular viewer in almost very respect.

As the title suggests, I feel it can only be a case of the Emperor's New Clothes when reviewers commend this as a classic and brilliant film. In a discussion with a friend of mine I was also treated to the same rhetoric when I disagreed - that I must be some kind of unintelligent heathen who only likes simple action films. Not so, unfortunately. Rather, I just spent the last two hours being bored to within an inch of my life. Only because I thought there must be something coming that justified said glowing reviews did I not leave the theatre, but it turned out to be as bad a decision as going in there in the first place. The film setting is pretty much the most dismal and dreary image of 1970's England imaginable. Everything is brown or grey, dirty and uninspiring, as if looking through the eyes of a severely depressed individual. We are treated to endless scenes of characters simply moving from one dreary location to another, and then sitting there not speaking. Smiley, whilst brilliantly acted by Oldman, seems incapable of responding to any dialog without first a 30 second pause of suspended animation. The majority of the rest of the characters comprised a bunch of sour, rude and miserable old men, none of which I developed even the slightest compassion for. The basic story of the film is the discovery of a mole in MI6, except that since MI6 appeared to consist of the most miserable human beings on the planet then really, who cares if they find the mole or not? In fact, why not leave the mole there since he's the only thing that's even vaguely interesting. The mole is, of course, finally uncovered in a scene that typifies the film: another brown room, two miserable old men not speaking and not moving. Cinematography also seems to be another buzzword to use here, so let's address it. To be fair, some nice use of the camera does add a modicum of style, but it's nothing that hasn't been done before, and if anything it's overused to the point where it gets in the way of the film and becomes tiresome. It's not that there aren't some good points, there are. There are a few well done scenes, the acting is good, and the younger characters do infuse some life into the plot. However, unfortunately these islands of relief are few and far between, and the result was two and a bit of the most dreary and uninspiring hours of my life.

I love the '79 TV serial and the book it was based on. I went to this expecting, given the cast and LeCarre's involvement, that it would be an interesting attempt to compress and update the original and that the noble effort would fall short. Unfortunately, this film is a disaster at every level. Not a single element rises to the level of the original, most are far worse, and the failures are stupid and unnecessary. In the course of trimming the material to film-length, someone decided to leave out character development. Lacon, Bland, Esterhazy and Haydon are semi-dimensional ciphers and Alleline and Control are peevish wasps. What a waste! Oldman, playing Smiley, tries for reserve and manages to look petrified; the botox budget must have been enormous. I have never appreciated the expressive and nuanced performances of Alec Guiness and the rest of the original cast so much. By all means, watch the DVD of the original and its sequel. And if this bunch ever remakes Smiley's People, stay away.

There is a certain snobbery with films that require more than a small amount of attention – an opinion that if you even ask about a small detail that you missed that you should then go watch Transformers and leave real films to the grownups. It is unpleasant superiority and it is mostly undeserved because to be honest this is a hard film to follow and it does demand attention. Those wishing to insult me via private message can do so, but I did struggle several times to understand how things fitted together and what relevance certain scenes had. This didn't limit my enjoyment of the film though and mostly I still followed the broad stroke of the plot, even if some bits of it did lose me. I've not read the tome of a book or seen the BBC mini-series, so I can't comment how well it compresses down to this two-hour film, but for me it did at times seem to be cramming a lot into a small time and occasionally it felt like it was unnecessarily convoluted or confusing. If you stay with it as best you can, it is intriguing and rather dramatic considering that much of the film is people talking to one another as opposed to chases and gun fights. The success of this is mostly down to the atmosphere and tone created by director Alfredson, because there is a constant tension to the film – cold perhaps, but very tense at times, certainly not bored even if it can look that way from a distance. This is not what he does best though, because to there was an aspect to the film that was excellent and this was the feeling of outdatedness, of an unnecessary function and a pointless "war". This feeling is in the characters, in the set-decoration and in every shot. The men we follow had the height of their import many years ago – now it appears they are mainly fighting their equal numbers on the other side simply because they exist. I really liked this overarching sense of smallness that sat across the film and I enjoyed finding it being employed in even the smallest detail – in the attitude of a minor character through to the cheap "do not unplug" text scrawled on the wall (those that work in older offices will know this feeling). Alfredson is bang on the money with this feeling, it is part of the story and it is brilliantly delivered throughout. Speaking of brilliant delivery, the cast is deep in British talent and unsurprisingly they deliver. Oldman may not have won the Oscar but he is great here – working with restraint and doing so much. He does so much with minor reactions and movements and he is a great character. He is the lead here but alongside him is a cast that is hard not to just list – Cumberbach, Hurt, Jones, Firth, Burke, Graham, Hardy and so on; British all perhaps but it says a lot that almost all of the supporting players here will be recognised internationally. Everyone gives strong performances and everyone seems to understand what Alfredson is doing. Overall, this is a great film albeit one that is not as easy to follow as those impatient snobs would have you believe. It is OK to struggle with some aspects and it is still easy to enjoy the film. The plot engaged me but what stayed with me more than anything else was how it all seemed so unimportant, how those involved were all working to ignore the irrelevance of their work and how very tired this world seemed – this aspect was very well done and made the film as much as Oldman's strong central performance.