Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - DVD/Blu-Ray Review

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is released on DVD/Blu-ray on 30 January

Tomas Alfredson, director of ‘Let The Right One In’, delves into the world of Cold War espionage in his adaptation of John le Carré’s eminent spy novel ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’

THE REAL

SPY

GAME

illed as the anti-Bond, Tomas Alfredson’s bold and claustrophobic thriller is as much about the atmosphere of corporations and how the people within, particularly men, behave with one another. Knowledge is the form of currency here and ensuring that you are the only holder of this information is the motive behind so much deception. If you want to make it to the top floor, honesty won’t get you there.

The backdrop of the Cold War and the British Intelligence Service, MI6, makes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, at first glance, nominally a spy film. But if you look closer, the film is more about patterns of behaviour, relationships, glances, flickers of suggestion and supressed emotions. Spys and spying are merely the vehicles that drive all of these themes.

Alfredson’s adaptation of the much loved novel by John le Carré, also inherits the reputation of the heralded BBC television series starring Sir Alec Guinness as spymaster George Smiley. This time around it’s Gary Oldman playing the retired agent, forced out when a mission in Hungary costs a man his life, but called back when suspicions arise of a Russian “mole” at the top of “the Circus”.

Much of le Carré’s brilliance is his playful use of language to describe either the surroundings or job descriptions of his characters.

Those asked to do the Circus’ dirty work are gruesomly labelled “scalphunters”, and the juxtaposition of “the Circus” with with that of its Russian opposite, “Central”, allows for a typically quaint and eccentric ‘Britishness’ to permeate from the story. After all, much of Tinker is to do with an age of men from a bygone era. They are seen as ‘past their time’, and, like Smiley, eventually left on the scrapheap.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

THE INQUISITOR George Smiley (Oldman) talks all things spy with Esterhase (David Dencik, left).

SMOOTH MOVER Oscar winner Colin Firth mans the phones as Bill Haydon (right).

‘There is as much excitement in all the verbal sparring sessions than any sequence of extravagant stunt-work or rapid gun-fire’

Along with the head of the Circus, Control - played by a rasping John Hurt, Smiley is ‘retired’ . But not after long he is asked to investigate those who are now at the head of British Intelligence. The return of a rogue agent, Ricky Tarr, played an enigmatic Tom Hardy, who claims to hold vital information regarding the “safeguarding of the Circus”, sparks a molehunt into four members of the high table.

There is no great action set piece or car chase while Smiley chases his suspect. Rather a methodical and careful unravelling of the mole’s web of deceit.

Scriptwriters Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor have delt expertly with le Carré’s convoluted plot and strung the whole piece together, in terms of elapses in time, with a recurring scene of an office Christmas party where all involved exchange ever more curious looks at each other. As the film progresses these exchanges take on new meanings and more tragic connotations, and are the heart of what makes le Carré’s novel so revered.

Timelines are subtly signalled by changes in costume, particularly Smiley’s glasses as they switch from a trim, sleek pair, to a rather binocular type pair that are prescribed to him upon his return to the Circus. But behind them is a razorsharp mind and one that will rival his great opponent Karla, the

man behind the planting of the mole.

Much of the film’s ‘action’ takes inside smoke filled rooms and bleak office spaces. Though there is as much excitement in all the verbal sparring sessions, at which John Hurt is supreme, than any sequence of extravagant stuntwork or rapid gunfire. In fact, Oldman’s portrayal of Smiley enbodies the whole tone of the film. Reserved, meditative and meticulous. Some might say cold and uninvolving because of the convoluted plot. But the highest praise that the film can be given is that it strips down the novel’s labyrinthine method and cranks the broiling eroticism and sexual tensions that are only alluded to by le Carré. Oldman’s Smiley also posesses a steely ruthlessness, and isn’t hesitant to send even his most loyal aide, Peter Guillam Bendict Cumberbatch), into life threatening situations. Here is a Smiley we haven’t seen before.

Bursting with age old musings of loyalty and betrayal, Alfredson has masterfully exhumed some of the atmospheres of the time. But Tinker is also a film about the breakdown of relationships and its consequences. Who knew it would take a Swede to get under the skin of 70s Britain and find out what made people tick. A superb film.

Jack Jones