Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A film labeled "cerebral" rarely inspires one to rush to the nearest cinema and buy a ticket. Such films are usually relegated to the art-house circuit. There are exceptions, of course (2010's multidimensional puzzle-within-a-dream, Inception, succeeded at the box office because it was aggressively marketed as a film by the Batman director and featured some gorgeously staged set pieces), but they tend to be few and far between.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, based on the (almost) eponymous novel by John le Carré, save the commas in the title, is directed by Tomas Alfredson, a master of subtlety, whose previous film, Let The Right One In, put on screen a surprisingly touching depiction of the relationship between a vampire and a human, infinitely superior to the other big-name productions of that or any other year.

Alfredson's latest film is as subdued as it is oblique, and yet despite the eternally gray skies of its settings - London, Istanbul, Budapest - and the oppressiveness of its silences, it features performances that dazzle and seem to fit the secrecy and the indecipherability of the world of 1970s British intelligence like a glove.

It is 1973 when Control (John Hurt), head of the government's spy agency nicknamed "The Circus," sends one of his top agents to Budapest in an effort to find out whether the agency has a double agent in its midst, allegedly working with the Russians. Things go awry and the agent, Jim Prideaux, is shot in the back in public. The international incident sends Control packing with his senior agent, George Smiley (a heavily made-up Gary Oldman in one of his most toned-down performances), but a mysterious phone call from another agent who has been disavowed and claims to have access to the identity of the traitor, the "mother of all secrets," quickly sets the ball rolling again. This revelation paves the way for a behind-the-scenes inquest, led by Smiley, into this rumor that there might be a mole in the Circus.

This agent - Ricky Tarr, played by a very shaggy Tom Hardy - and Prideaux are the emotional hooks of a work that otherwise keeps expressive scenes to a minimum, and instead chooses to stage its action with the purpose of delicately disquieting us. In this regard, one moment provides an illuminating example: In an Istanbul butchery, an anxious Tarr makes a phone call to an acquaintance to warn her that her life is in danger. He doesn't reach her, but in the background a meat cleaver hacks away at a piece of meat.

This is a spy film, make no mistake about it, but it is unlike any spy film we have seen in the past few decades. It is a world, as Julio Iglesias reminds us in his song over the closing credits, that is filled with reflections shifting shape under the pouring rain.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy takes itself and its subject very seriously: It all seems very realistic, but because of all the shortcuts and the veil of secrecy that goes along with national intelligence, this realism comes across as both haunting and enigmatic. One such shortcut sees a main character killed off in parentheses, in a very brief shot during the opening credits; if you blink, you might miss it.

Relationships and intentions are telescoped rather than spelled out, and while the film is frugal with the information it provides, and the nitty-gritty will continue to elude the viewer even on a second viewing, the puzzle does reveal itself at long last, albeit rather hazily.

Powerful, thrilling images are complemented by meaningful words, though sometimes these are merely uttered in a whisper, and they still need to be rearranged before we can make sense of it all.

One has the sense that Alfredson is in complete control of his subject, and indeed the film exudes a remarkable confidence in the execution of the screenplay, but in the end it is also clear the film could have used its two-hour running time much more wisely. If the film messes with your head, it is not because of a deluge of data, but rather because the data is always found wanting.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not quite The Departed, but as an atmospheric investigation of the cracks in an intimate national intelligence outfit, complete with many a scene in a Citroen DS, it is certainly a worthy addition to the spy genre.

André Crous can be reached at
acrous@praguepost.com