Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s (Let The Right One In) adaptation of John Le Carré’s spy novel is a murky but rigorous entry in the genre. If Jason Bourne represented a sleeker, bleaker take on Bond, then George Smiley is Bourne’s even bleaker cousin. Played out in shabby offices filled with cigarette smoke, and grey eastern European locales, Tinker Tailor would be dreary were it not so impressively lean, with no fat to the story whatsoever. Gary Oldman makes a much-trumpeted return to form as Smiley, an agent who is hastily retired, along with MI5 chief Control (John Hurt), after a bungled mission in Hungary, during which an agent attempting to gather information about a Russian mole is shot and kidnapped. It’s the first of many beautifully restrained, but nevertheless quite captivating set pieces, all of which have a very precise emotional resonance thanks to Alfredson’s top-notch cast. As rumours of a mole transform into certainty, Smiley is brought out of retirement and paired with Benedict Cumberbatch’s twitchy Agent Guillam, both gradually chipping away at what little information they have, a situation, as is revealed to us, that Smiley has been in for his entire life. The machinations of the plot are complicated, though not impossible to follow, and I imagine that prior knowledge of either the novel or the vaunted 70s TV series would help make things a bit clearer to understand. That being said, even if some of the details do get somewhat lost in the muddle, there are plenty of individually memorable moments, most notably an extended sequence in which Tom Hardy’s outwardly more relaxed, inwardly more vulnerable Ricki Tarr recounts a mission in Istanbul where he falls in love with the wife of a Soviet agent. Alfredson’s directorial style is reminiscent of crime classics Goodfellas and Zodiac, but he brings the same emotional acuity that he brought to the undead in Let The Right One In; even the most chillily-staged of scenes has an emotional undercurrent.
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