Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Directed by: Tomas Alfredson
London, 1973. Control (John Hurt), the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) chairs his last meeting of the Circus, his most senior officers: Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) and George Smiley (Gary Oldman). Edgy, paranoid, and scoffed at by his government masters over his belief that there is a Soviet mole operating within the Circus, Control has initiated an operation to meet a defecting Hungarian general in Budapest, and get information from him about the mole. But the mission has gone wrong … the agent (Jim Prideaux, played by Mark Strong) has been shot, apparently to death, and now Control must pay the price. Smiley, too, is being retired – a victim of being seen as Control’s man.
Alleline is appointed as the new Control, and his predecessor dies. MI6’s reputation with its masters and its American allies starts to recover, largely due to a stream of highly valuable material it begins to provide from a mysterious source known as Witchcraft. Then, out of the blue, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), an agent who’d gone missing in Istanbul, contacts MI6’s civil service boss, Lacon (Simon McBurney), telling a similar story of a mole at the top of the service. Lacon turns to the retired Smiley who, together with MI6 man Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) and a retired Special Branch officer, begins to piece together the clues gathered by the late Control to identify the mole.
The network of spies that needs to be untangled in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is one layer of the fabric that makes up this story. Beneath this lies another skein of relationships, involving many of the same characters, but far more secretive, furtive and powerful in its motivating power on the story. Scarcely any of the agents is free of a connection that calls their loyalty into question, and Smiley is no exception – director Tomas Alfredson makes much more of the relationship between Smiley and Soviet super-spy Karla than the 1979 TV series did, hinting at an unconsummated sexual dimension to their decades-long mutual antagonism. (We are afforded only the briefest of glimpses of both Karla and and Smiley’s unfaithful wife, Anne). Elsewhere, old relationships surface as catalysts and diversions, exploited by good and bad guys alike to achieve their ends.
The London depicted in this new adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy novel is almost a character in its own right, and it sets the scene in more ways than one. Horribly, grubbily authentic, it says “forget car chases, shoot-outs, abseiling escapes and laser-protected secure rooms. This is the real world of spies, and it’s a dirty business”. The capital looks tired, dingy, the architectural and decorative embodiment of a place that had lost an empire and failed to find a role. The flesh-and-blood personae share this all-too-human characteristic – there isn’t a Bourne, Bond or Ethan Hunt to be seen. Instead, these spies live by their wits, convictions and intellect and that’s what makes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (in all of its incarnations) so enjoyable.
Freed from the need to propel the action from one unlikely set-piece to the next, the plot holds together brilliantly. Alfredson does not try to hurry things along, letting facts emerge in a way that builds tension slowly, inexorably. Perhaps he is too parsimonious with details in the first half – it can be hard to follow at times, particularly if you are unfamiliar with the novel or the TV series. But it pays off in most respects, leaving Smiley with the most un-showy yet satisfying of victories at the end.
And, unlike so many British movies (this is a bugbear of mine), this movie does not feel small in its ambition or production design.
