TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
Directed by: Tomas Alfredson
Written by: Bridget O’Conner, Peter Straughan, John le Carré (novel)
Starring: Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Ciaran Hinds
Adapting any novel, especially a dense, complex, convoluted, thematically deep novel like John le Carré’s sprawling, bestselling 1974 novel, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, into a two-hour feature-length film seems impractical, even impossible. Anyone even tangentially familiar with John le Carré’s novel or the seven-part, 1979 BBC miniseries starring Sir Alec Guinness must have wondered how or even why a filmmaker would choose such a daunting, potentially impossible task, but that’s exactly what Swedish director Tomas Alfredson, little known stateside until his last film, LET THE RIGHT ONE, became an art-house success in North America, picked as his next project (his first in English).
Set, like le Carré’s novel, in the early 1970s at the height of the Cold War, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY centers on the power plays, betrayals, and otherwise duplicitous behavior that tends to be the norm at the ‘Circus,’ the home of MI6 (British secret intelligence). The chief operations officer, known only as ‘Control’ (John Hurt), suspicious of a high-ranking Soviet mole inside MI6, sends a field agent, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong), behind the Iron Curtain, ostensibly to meet with a East European general. When the operation goes sideway, the Powers-That-Be replace Control with his main rival, Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), an MI6 officer keen to strengthen ties with the United States through intelligence gathered from a Soviet double agent. Control’s second-in-command, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), also loses his position.
A year later, Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), a senior civil servant and point man for the secretary of state for defense, asks Smiley to come out of retirement and re-start Control’s search for the Soviet mole. With the head of the field division, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), as his deputy, Smiley begins the investigation in earnest from Control’s list of suspects, including Alleline, Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Alleline’s current deputy, and two other high-ranking Circus officers, Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Dencik). A rogue field agent (a.k.a., ‘scalphunter’), Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), contacts Lacon and Smiley when he returns to London. Tarr claims the Soviet mole helped to scuttle knowledge of the mole’s activities inside MI6.
Le Carré’s novel is dense, complex, and convoluted. The adaptation is also dense, complex, and convoluted, especially considering the amount of narrative compressed into a two-hour running time. Working from a screenplay written by Bridget O’Conner and Peter Straughan, Alfredson accomplishes the seemingly impossible: creating a coherent, comprehensible adaptation that manages to remain remarkably true to le Carré’s subplot-heavy, character-rich, time-shifting novel. While familiarity with le Carré’s novel or the BBC miniseries can only help, Alfredon’s adaptation stands on its own. TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY does, however, demand a level of attention, attentiveness, and focus from moviegoers, perhaps too much, especially from mainstream audiences who’ve grown accustomed to frequent narrative stops for spoon-fed exposition.
Moviegoers unfamiliar with Le Carré’s novel will also notice a distinct lack of action, at least how it’s currently defined by the spy genre (e.g., physical stunts, car chases, gunfights, massive amounts of mayhem, etc.). TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY’s action occurs primarily offscreen. When action occurs onscreen, Alfredson, his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema, and his editor, Dino Jonsäter (both frequent collaborators), handle it with a cool, detached, almost perfunctory manner. There’s another kind of action, of course, but that kind of action occurs in the emphasis or inflection on certain words, in the pauses between words, in the play of barely suppressed emotion across a face half-hidden by cigarette smoke, or in a subtle shift in posture.
Little of that would have mattered if Alfredson hadn’t chosen his cast wisely. He did. Whether due to a fit between character and actor or actor and director (or, most likely, both), every actor, regardless of the size of his/her role or time onscreen, gives a note-perfect performance. Oldman gives, if not the best, then one of the best, performances of his career on film. Known primarily for larger-than-life, flamboyant roles, Oldman went with a quieter, more introspective, if no less intense, performance as Smiley, a career intelligence officer who’s more bureaucrat than spy. Smiley, however, is no caricature. He’s a fully fleshed-out, rounded character, a character with an inner life, a character with an emotional life (much of it connected to his estranged wife) that, when expressed, brings Smiley’s cool reserve, a façade if there ever was one, crumbling down.
