Tomas Alfredsson, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (2011)
I’m too young to know the 1979 BBC TV series starring Alec Guinness but general critical consensus is that this movie adaptation compares well with that series. Alfredsson’s version shines mainly for its cast and its atmosphere of melancholy, tiredness and muted cynicism. Where it falters is in the mundane plot, of which much had to be pared away to the extent that the punch-line between protagonist George Smiley (Gary Oldman) and the villain of the piece seems hastily written in as an after-thought, and its heavy-handed treatment. The sub-text about loyalty and duty seems weak and underdone.
Smiley and his boss Control (John Hurt) get the sack from MI6 over a botched spy rendezvous in Hungary that nearly kills agent Prideaux (Mark Strong) and leaves him so shaken he leaves the service to live as a hermit in a ratchety caravan. This incident puts a quartet of senior agents in charge of MI6: these men have earned their stripes by obtaining secret Soviet papers under Operation Witchcraft and sharing these with the CIA who pass to the men supposedly bogus American intelligence to give to the Russians. Not long after, Smiley is called out of retirement to investigate a claim by agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) that there is a high-placed traitor or mole in MI6 working for the Soviets. Tarr later turns up at Smiley’s house and proceeds to tell him everything he knows including the revelation that the mole is being handled by a top Soviet spymaster called Karla whom Smiley once met.
Smiley instructs an aide, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), to steal a logbook relevant to their case and both men discover two vital pages are missing from it. Smiley then visits Prideaux and learns he had originally gone to Hungary to find the name of the MI6 mole under the pretence of doing something else for Control. After more snooping around, Smiley discovers the senior agents at the helm of MI6 have been passing valuable papers substituted by the mole for what they believe is worthless rubbish to Russian spy Polyakov (Konstantin Khabensky) under Operation Witchcraft; the Russians in their turn are passing garbage of their own to the British and the Americans. Eventually Smiley sets up a meeting at a safe house to capture the mole (Colin Firth) who is one of the four senior agents.
The plot is not difficult to follow but it is very slow and once viewers work it out (and some may be able to predict in advance who the mole is), the film settles into a sedate rut in which facial expressions and even the amount of moisture filling up in someone’s eyes close up are to be interpreted as giving away someone’s thoughts and feelings about something. (There is something Pythonesquely farcical about two enemy sides swapping rubbish for rubbish and both pretending the garbage they send is valuable stuff while falling for the garbage they receive: this points up how useless intelligence agencies were back in the days when the film was set and how even more useless such agencies are now in the age of the Internet.) Oldman is good as Smiley but his character becomes too authoritative too quickly and doesn’t have enough of the rat-like quality that I suspect the character should have (I haven’t yet read the book). His meetings with Tarr seem unreal, perhaps because Hardy portrays Tarr as a very earthy, working-class agent at the coal-face of spying while Oldman’s Smiley is remote and Olympian. The rest of the cast is good though individual actors like Firth don’t have much to do. There is some over-acting by individuals like Hurt but as they don’t appear in nearly every scene to the extent that Oldman does, this is a minor point.
Although the cinematography is good and often very beautiful, especially in scenes of grey sky and rain, and the film’s ambience is of drab, relentless grey mood, the pace isn’t always consistent: at times the film moves slowly, then all of a sudden, and especially towards the end, the movie starts racing through a sequence of efficient camera shots showing people being captured, arrested or killed, often from bird’s-eye points of view or similar slanted viewpoints. Would that there were more of these sequences in the film, especially for Tarr’s recounting of his affair with Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova). Alfredsson is a good director but his earnest approach burdens the film with more weight than it needs. The climax when it occurs is very fleeting and viewers may feel cheated that it’s not given the importance a climax should have although I’m of the view that if Smiley had suspected in advance who the mole was, then the climax doesn’t need much emphasis at all.
A message about loyalty and duty to ideals as opposed to Queen and Country is weakly developed: Firth’s character Haydon, when cornered, tells Smiley that he finds Western society “ugly” but doesn’t elaborate on what this means. There is an earlier scene in the film in which MI6 staff celebrate Christmas and a Santa figure begins singing an old Russian Communist tune; the entire staff joins in and Smiley runs out of the knees-up. What’s the meaning of this scene and how might it relate to Haydon’s later statement about Western society? Presumably viewers must intuit how British spies often found the Soviet socialist system a more attractive political / economic system than their own (and Smiley himself alludes to this idea while talking about Karla to Guillam). Perhaps the Soviet spies also wistfully glorified the capitalist system among themselves. It was often the case that British spies were estranged enough from their country’s values, politics, history and culture that they willingly agreed to be double agents but the film doesn’t attempt to explore this possibility as a plausible rationale for Haydon’s treachery and that of others, and so viewers are left to puzzle over why Haydon and other people might want to spy for the Russians when the penalty for betrayal might be extremely punitive. And of course if many British spies did feel alienated from their country’s culture, we must ask: why so many and what caused them to feel this way?
Not a bad film, indeed for its style and cast, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” gets more hits than misses but it could have been faster with fewer lingering shots of whiskey being poured into glasses and with as many of the significant characters as possible having a back-story relevant to the plot, even if it has to be sketchy. More emphasis could have been placed on Smiley’s marriage to Anne and its break-up as this was important to the plot. There was a great movie struggling to get out but it missed its chance by a hair’s breadth.