It’s the early 70s, and British espionage is in turmoil. An operation in Hungary has gone wrong and Control (John Hurt), dying head of intelligence agency The Circus, has been forced out, taking his deputy Smiley (Gary Oldman) with him. Cold war tensions with the Soviet Union are at a peak and there are suspicions of a mole operating at the highest levels of The Circus. So Smiley is called back to put together a secret team to uncover which one of the four men at the head table is working with the Soviets. Suffice to say, no car chases or shoot-outs follow.
That summary barely skims the surface of this adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel – a plot so notoriously complex that even the five hour 1979 BBC miniseries (with Alec Guinness as Smiley) left people confused – but director Tomas Alfredson (of
Let The Right One In fame) does an excellent job of streamlining the flashback-heavy story’s many twists and turns. To uncover the mole Smiley has to find out what happened in Hungary; Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) was shot in a café while trying to bring a defector over to the West, but who sold him out? Rogue agent Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy) might have a piece of the puzzle, but Control’s replacement Percy Alleline (Toby Jones) has put a warrant out on him. Aside from a handful of hand-picked men, including Peter Gulliam (Benedict Cumberbatch), there’s no-one Smiley can trust, least of all prime suspects Alleline, Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds) and Toby Esterhase (David Denick).
This is a film where a big action sequence involves someone walking in and retrieving a file from a library, but don’t take that to mean this isn’t edge-of-your-seat viewing. The setting may be global espionage but the drama is all personal, a seedy world of backstabbing and betrayal where love is a weakness ruthlessly exploited (see every single mention of Smiley’s wife) and trust is a luxury that comes at a very high price. And if that requires a lot of scenes in seedy flats and dingy offices where people just talk or swap meaningful glances, so much the better.
As the cast list suggests, this is pretty much a showcase for the UK’s current crop of A-list actors, all of whom shine no matter how brief their appearance. Firth as a smug womaniser might seem an obvious stand-out and he has a bunch of great moments, but Jones’ final appearance is equally amazing. Hardy is excellent as a man crumbling at the edges, Strong is especially good at suggesting depths only hinted at with his character, and… well, everyone is great here and they’re all in the shade of Oldman, taking on Guinness’ classic role (literally – there’s a scene early on where Smiley replaces his old glasses with Guinness-as-Smiley’s trademark blocky frames) and completely making it his own.
Any possible niggles would be minor ones. The film works so hard to get all the character moments right and make individual scenes work (right down to the music - the film-stealing sequence is set to the 1940s era toe-tapping “Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now, while an office Christmas party constantly revisited for extra layers of betrayal features the Soviet national anthem) that the mystery element falls a little by the wayside, with a final revelation that feels a lot more obvious than it should. Being set so firmly in the bleak 70s – the art direction here is as convincingly murky as the world it portrays – does distance the drama from us a little as well, with a layer of nostalgia blanketing the wider issues. Even the sad, bland, forgettable Smiley comes off as more of a master manipulator than the average man he was in previous versions.
This is the kind of intelligent story-telling we don’t see nearly often enough these days, a film that credits the audiences’ intelligence and recognises that the drama between people can be far more compelling than any number of explosions. Fingers crossed it opens the door for adapting the following novels in Le Carre’s Smiley/ Karla trilogy: more of the same would be very welcome indeed here.
- Four stars
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens nationally January 19th. In the meantime, check out our interview with Colin Firth here.