Film review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson

Starring: Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Toby Jones

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BEFITTING the Cold War setting and the repressed, male-dominated milieu of the British intelligence services in the 1970s, Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson’s take on John Le Carré’s classic spy novel is a chilly, emotionally austere piece of filmmaking that favours brains over brawn and buries intrigue under layers of banal detail. Action sequences – or the closest the film gets to them – take place amid rows of dusty documents and involve bags, tags and coded calls from the local garage.

Dialogue is comprised of intricate chatter about ideologies, politics and corruption. And the film’s drab, grey locales are populated with sickly looking middle-aged men with ulcers and broken relationships, or younger men on their way to acquiring those things. There’s no glamour, very few guns, and barely any girls. James Bond’s “blunt instrument” approach to espionage and the amped-up authenticity of Jason Bourne’s world are nowhere in sight. Instead, the protagonists of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are a more tragic breed of movie spook: men hollowed out physically and emotionally by the sacrifices they’ve made for their country or their blinkered beliefs.

It’s important to make that adjustment early on. The film doesn’t hang around waiting for us to get up to speed with the detached style Alfredson adopts. It can’t afford to. With a surfeit of plot to cram into little over two hours, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy relies on close attention being paid to what’s being said, when and by whom, and it trusts and expects viewers to hold onto every morsel of information as it flashes back-and-forth in time tying up loose strands. Not that it’s completely impenetrable.

Underneath the layers of obfuscation and detail-heavy exposition, the film offers a classic Cold War narrative revolving around an attempt to find a mole that has infiltrated the upper echelons of the security services, known as the Circus, to supply secrets to the Russians. Charged with finding said double agent is George Smiley (Gary Oldman), an MI6 agent whose reputation is in the process of being tarnished as the film opens and a job-gone-wrong results in the death of a colleague.

Smiley’s superior, Control (John Hurt), is made the fall guy, swiftly followed by Smiley himself. But when Control dies soon after of a heart attack, leaving a trail of evidence pointing towards corruption in the Circus, Smiley is recruited off the books to flush out the traitor with the aid of impish young upstart Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and an MI6 “scalp-hunter” called Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy), who wants out of the life and has secrets to tell.

What follows is a labyrinthine thriller in which excitement is predicated more on the cumulative joy of watching Smiley methodically piece together the disparate pieces of the puzzle. His methods are quiet and low-key; he uses silence to intimidating and unnerving effect, talks precisely, and knows when to stand his ground and when to make his move. He has the confidence of a man sure of his own morality, even if his personal life is falling apart around him.

All of this gives him a heroic edge, though the film takes care not to exploit it in a simplistic way. That’s partly down to Oldman, who refuses to pander to genre expectations. Smiley’s status as a man cuckolded by his devotion to a serially unfaithful wife might point towards a sad-sack man who clings to his job as a way of holding on to his masculinity, but Oldman doesn’t play him that way. Nor does he make Smiley a saintly crusader in a den of sinners. His Smiley is tenacious in a stealthy way, existing half in and half out of the shadows, his crumpled, mild-mannered, book-keeper demeanor – thick black-rimmed glasses, pomaded white hair, rumpled mack – belying the kind of ruthlessness needed to get the job done.

Of course, fans of the award-winning 1979 TV version may never see anyone other than Alec Guiness in the role, but Oldman makes the character his own, dialing down the tics and tricks that enabled him to coin it in during the 1990s as a Hollywood ham-for-hire (albeit an entertaining one) whenever an action movie needed a villain. It’s a performance of great subtlety and strength and it glues the film together on the rare occasions when the sheer number of main players threatens to rip it apart.

The titular code-named suspects for instance (played by Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds and David Dencik) are elliptically sketched and, as such, not always as involving as they might have been. That also makes the ending feel rather muted given that effort expended in the build-up. And yet that seems true to the story being told, something that is reflected in the oppressive way Alfredson films London and the Circus’s secret HQ, cleverly blurring the line between the good guys and the bad guys because, well, there is no definitive line in a world made up of so many grey areas.