Anyone old enough to remember scurrying home from work in 1979 to catch the BBC’s superb miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy might be forgiven for sniffing at the prospect of a new big-screen take on John le Carre’s finest espionage novel. Le Carre’s labyrinthine plotting and densely written, dialogue-heavy characters lend themselves more readily to episodic television than to a splashy Hollywood movie beamed at post-boomers who barely remember the Cold War — let alone Alec Guinness, who immortalized George Smiley as the most powerfully self-effacing spy ever to have shuffled down a sidewalk bearing a battered briefcase.
But beyond the use of younger actors, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (who made the acclaimed 2008 vampire horror flick Let the Right One In) seems to care little for target demographics. He’s made exactly the post-World War II period thriller he wanted to make — and if it hasn’t made le Carre (who served as executive producer) ecstatic, I’d like to know the reason why.
For starters, Alfredson has coaxed out of Gary Oldman a restraint I’d have thought was beyond the actor who brought us Sid Vicious, Sirius Black, Mason Verger and — earlier this year in the wretched Red Riding Hood — some crazed dude in a purple cassock.
As Smiley, a senior MI6 operative brought out of retirement to hunt down a high-level mole who’s feeding British intelligence to the Soviets, Oldman doesn’t try to ape Guinness, or to top him. His spymaster has a whey-faced impassivity all his own; this is an inscrutable company man who’s as quietly authoritative on the job as he is utterly adrift in his personal life, where he’s serially cuckolded by a feckless wife whose face we never see.
Anonymous in an elderly brown raincoat, Smiley peers owlishly at the major suspects, every one of them damaged goods like himself, at home only in the warped missions they carry out in the name of patriotic duty — or treachery. Tinker, Tailor has a glittering ensemble that includes Colin Firth as the smirking, debonair colleague who covets Smiley’s wife, and Toby Jones as Percy Alleline, the blustering aspirant to the MI6 throne after the death of Control. As the latter — who falls on his sword following a botched operation in Hungary that endangers key agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) — John Hurt is a soused ruin. And Kathy Burke is terrific as Connie, the Circus’ only female top player, also forcibly retired and living off the past.
