Seventies Spy

Director Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John le Carre's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is an uncommon movie going event. A intelligent, complicated film that requires attention and patience from the audience. It's the kind of movie we're always hearing they don't make anymore, until they do. And here it is.

The story is pretty standard stuff; a mole has infiltrated the highest levels of British intelligence, and must be flushed out. "There's a rotten apple," the agency head, known only as Control (John Hurt), tells his agent, Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong). "We have to find it." And with that, he dispatches Prideaux to Budapest to get the mole's name. The agent is promptly shot. Control is dismissed, but after his death, his deputy George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is asked to investigate the mole. He narrows it down to four men: new agency head Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) and his deputies Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), and Toby Esterhase (David Denick). And thus, slowly, methodically, Smiley sets out to find his man.

Alfredson, working from a tight screenplay by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor, trusts the viewer to piece together who is who and who does what; in this regard, the distinguished cast of recognizable actors (which also includes Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch) is an indisputable asset. The film also offers the opportunity to watch some of the finest character actors squaring off, and working with more than the meager material they're sometimes saddled with in their small supporting turns. You've seldom seen this many fine British actors outside the Harry Potter pictures; there are so many good roles that even the smaller ones are filled by interesting young actors, like Christian McKay (from "Me & Orson Welles) and Stephen Graham (who plays Al Capone on "Boardwalk Empire"). The supporting cast performs admirably, with particular kudos due to recently minted Oscar winner Firth, who is doing some utterly extraordinary things in his final scene with Oldman.

Having this set of familiar faces in place allows Alfredson to just get on with things, indulging in the kind of elliptical storytelling--filled with flashbacks, detours, and dead-ends--that is le Carre's forte. The director's style isn't flashy, it's a deceptively low-key picture in which voices are seldom raised. Alfredson has a sure sense of exactly when to get in and out of a scene, and he can build tension with the basic tools of lingering close-ups and Alberto Iglesias's moody score. There are many scenes that build susspense from a simple phone ringing or a quick gaze. 

The filmmakers couldn't have a sturdier presence at the film's center than Oldman. The astonishing restraint of his performance will come as a surprise to those who remember the actor in full scenery chewing mode in films like "The Fifth Element" and "The Professional". But he works well in this minor key. This is not an aggressive character; he's so refined that he swims wearing his spectacles. But Oldman gives him a vibrant interior life, finding the characterization in the pauses rather than monologues. and when he is called to deliver he delivers in spades.

If you are one of the multitude who bemoan the death of intelligent adult thrillers then you owe it to yourself to seek out "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy".