Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s superlative new espionage thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, is a work of deep ambition. Its ambition is pitched towards plot, tone, mood, and design, rather than thematic density, but that is hardly a failing. In this era when genre film-making seems to be suffering under a suffocating plague of smash-bang hollowness, Tinker Tailor demonstrates that a spy picture crafted with patience and precision possesses a wonderfully emergent substance. Such films need not be “about” anything more pointed than the usual fixations of the genre–suspicion, obsession, cruelty–to be both sobering and enthralling, especially when they are as skillfully constructed as Tinker Tailor.

Husband-and-wife screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan adapted the film from the novel by acclaimed British author John le Carré, who also penned such seminal works as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Tailor of Panama, and The Constant Gardener. Le Carré worked for both the domestic-detailed MI5 and foreign-detailed MI6 prior to his career as a full-time writer, and his pessimistic, nuts-and-bolts view of the British intelligence service informs the tenor of Alfredson’s film version. (Tinker Tailor was previously adapted as a seven-part BBC series in 1979, starring Alec Guinness.)

The story centers on one of le Carré’s recurring characters, the owlish spymaster George Smiley (Gary Oldman), who serves as a deputy to “Control” (John Hurt), the head of fictionalized MI6 stand-in “The Circus” in the early 1970s. At the outset of the film, both Smiley and Control are forced into retirement following a botched operation in Hungary. During that operation, an agent (Mark Strong) is killed while following Control’s off-the-books orders to ferret out a suspected mole in his shop. The reins of the SIS thereafter pass to the remaining members of the Circus’ upper echelon: Roy Bland (Ciarán Hands), Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), and newly-appointed head Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), who runs an operation that has been milking a long-term and priceless Soviet double-agent.

Control’s paranoia is initially dismissed in the wake of the Hungary fiasco, but several months later the service’s Permanent Secretary (Simon McBurney) approaches Smiley. It seems that former agent and suspected defector Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) has contacted the Secretary directly, and verified the existence of Control’s mole. Perhaps sensing Smiley’s aimlessness in retirement, the Secretary asks him to conduct his own off-the-book operation on the Circus itself, in order determine which of his former colleagues is passing intelligence to the Soviets. Smiley promptly recruits Tarr’s young handler within the service (Benedict Cumberbatch) and an old ally (Roger Lloyd-Pack), and with their aid he begins to unravel the Circus’ tangle of secrets and rivalries.

There is little else to the narrative that needs to be disclosed here, as such detail would despoil the pleasure of watching Tinker Tailor unfold. The film’s sensibility is far afield from the slick cartoonishness of James Bond, with nary a speedboat chase or sultry femme fatale to be seen. Instead, Alfredson’s film leads the viewer into a labyrinth constructed of file folders, teletype, petty betrayals, and the seemingly endless feints and counter-feints between the Soviets and the West. The characters and jargon come fast and furious, and viewers can be forgiven for losing track of the plot here and there. It is, without question, a film for a post-The Wire audience, where hand-holding is gladly sacrificed in favor of verisimilitude and narrative sophistication. (The film’s cynicism regarding its central institution only strengthens the resemblance.) However, Tinker Tailor just as readily recalls Greg Rucka’s addictive comic series Queen & Country, which likewise foregrounds the British intelligence service’s bureaucratic twists and turns. Meanwhile, the film’s precise evocation of 1970s Britain—through both peerless production design and a mood of stultifying forlornness-—places in the rarefied company of Channel Four’s Red Riding, last year’s underrated cinematic masterpiece.

Such comparisons in no way detract from the proximate gratifications of Tinker Tailor, which is a self-contained work of distinguished cinematic craft in its own right. Centering the vast, uniformly excellent cast is Oldman, in his most strikingly physical performance in many years. Hidden behind thick spectacles and sagging skin, he conveys a man who has been appallingly eroded by a lifetime of high-stakes maneuvering and personal neglect, but nonetheless remains a brilliant and dangerous opponent. In addition to the dense-yet-nimble script, the film boasts splendid work from editor Dino Jonsäter and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema, both returning talents from Alfredson’s ground-breaking vampire film Let the Right One In. If Tinker Tailor contains a whiff of disappointment, it is only in comparison to that feature, which in addition to being a spot-on genre pleasure, offered a serving of chilly social and sexual commentary and provided an overdue jolt to the moribund world of horror cinema. In comparison, Tinker Tailor is “merely” a bloody good flick about the evil that men do.

St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series. Wyatt has worked as a freelance writer and game designer since 2000. When not watching, thinking about, and writing about cinema, he assumes the mild-mannered secret identity of an environmental scientist. He completed a bachelor’s degree in biology at Hope College in Holland, Mich., but returned to St. Louis to attain a master’s degree in environmental science from Washington University. He has been happily married since 2001.