A smashing Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Could the quietly effective career-spy in the feature-length film adaptation of John le Carré’s classic spy novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, be any more of a contrast to James Bond than he is?
In 1973 London, George Smiley wears glasses. He says little. He’s average —at least on the outside. A nondescript man at the elder edge of middle age, Smiley could be a mid-level civil servant, an accountant. And instead of harems of Bond girls, he has one unfaithful, frequently absent wife. In flashback he gazes at her with misty eyes, like a dog worshipping his beloved master. She’s his weak spot.
Gary Oldman, a contender for best actor this movie awards season, steps softly into his leading role as Smiley. Rather than be a leading man in recent years, Oldman is more likely to be seen in supporting roles in high-profile films. He co-stars as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series and Commissioner Jim Gordon in the Batman trilogy. He assumes the role of Smiley with understated, melancholy grace, an approach that makes his slow-burning performance all the more smashing.
Smiley is right-hand man to Control, head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, aka the Circus. John Hurt co-stars as the blustery Control, a wise but haggard veteran of Cold War and pre-Cold War espionage.
Control gives one his agents a special assignment in Hungary. He suspects there’s a mole, a double-agent working for the Soviets, at the top of the Circus.
“Trust no one, Jim,” he tells Jim Prideaux. “They’re after my head, Jim boy. You understand?”
Prideaux, played with consequence-pitted weight by frequent Guy Ritchie actor Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, RocknRolla, and Revolver), goes to Budapest for what becomes a disastrous mission. Back in London, the misadventure precipitates Control’s sacking.
“Well,” he tells his colleagues in the supposedly secure room where he meets with them for the last time, “a man should know when to leave the party. … Smiley is leaving with me.”
Retirement is a grim, solemn sentence for Smiley. Fortunately, he’s soon back in the game. On special assignment for the upper reaches of the British government, he spies upon the spies with whom he previously worked.
Flashbacks dispense clues about what’s going on, what’s been going on for years. Smiley and the movie’s audience work through the investigation together. It’s a steady, mostly unemotional process. Smiley stays close to home. No car chases, gun battles, exotic locales or sexual exploits.
The absence of the explosive action typical of normal spy movies makes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy all the more intense. Lives are in jeopardy, including those of Prideaux and Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), the Turkey-based Circus operative who first informs the Circus of the existence of a Soviet mole.
The dispassionate, deliberate Smiley collects and absorbs the evidence. Oldman depicts his character as a great listener. He hears, watches, investigates and meditates.
Smiley’s mole suspects, all of them inherited from Control, in this game of betrayal include Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), aka Tinker. A careerist Circus man, Alleline goes over Control’s head for the purpose of establishing a safe house for a Soviet source. There’s also the arrogant, womanizing Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), aka Tailor, and the bullish Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), aka Soldier.
Tomas Alfredson, the Swedish director of that unconventional vampire tale, Let the Right One In, and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, construct a nuanced, artfully detailed impression of le Carré’s best-known espionage story. Among the best movies of 2011, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy contains one of the year’s best performances, Oldman as le Carré’s anything but flashy master spy, the unforgettable Smiley.