Tomas Alfredson’s spy thriller is tense, melancholy and worth the concentration it demands. Gary Oldman makes Smiley’s stillness compelling, though the compressed storytelling sometimes leaves us sorting out the chronology when we should be worrying about people.
Tomas Alfredson makes the hunt for a mole in British intelligence feel like work performed by people who have forgotten how to do anything else. His adaptation of John le Carré’s novel is a tense, absorbing spy film, provided we accept that keeping up will take some effort. The Cold War setting supplies the official reasons for secrecy, but loyalty between colleagues matters just as much. Alfredson keeps our attention on the people conducting the search, and on how little reassurance they offer one another.
Gary Oldman’s George Smiley gives us little help, which is part of the pleasure. His stillness makes the slightest change of expression seem worth checking, and his reserve never suggests that there is nothing happening underneath. We felt uneasy watching his almost motionless face; Oldman makes it difficult to tell how much Smiley has understood, or how much he is prepared to forgive. Alfredson allows that uncertainty to persist without pushing the performance towards an obvious display of feeling.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s muted colours make this a dispiriting place to spend a working life, and that is an effective choice for a story about compromised loyalties. Maria Djurkovic’s production design gives the 1970s setting a convincing everyday drabness rather than inviting us to admire the period recreation. The details suggest an institution whose habits have lasted longer than anybody’s enthusiasm for them. These surroundings help explain why the characters seem so contained: nothing about the place encourages candour.
The difficulty lies in how much Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan have to compress into 127 minutes. Their screenplay assumes we can keep track of the people and their divided loyalties while Dino Jonsäter’s editing moves between different points in time. We welcome a thriller that expects concentration, but some of those shifts need clearer bearings. For a stretch, working out when something happened takes attention away from what it means to the person involved. That is a real limitation in a film already so reluctant to let its characters speak plainly.
Alberto Iglesias’s score helps sustain the tension without trying to make the espionage seem exciting in the conventional sense. It suits Alfredson’s steady pace, although music cannot supply the human connection that the compressed plotting occasionally misses. The ensemble does supply it, particularly Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam and Colin Firth as Bill Haydon. Their performances make the personal stakes felt even when the exact arrangement of the intrigue remains hard to follow.
The film’s restraint does sometimes harden into remoteness, and several supporting characters deserve more time than the screenplay can spare. That matters in a story where betrayal ought to hurt as well as help the investigation along. Yet the complaint that the film is emotionally empty seems wrong to us. The weariness in Oldman’s performance, and the loneliness running through Alfredson’s account of these secretive lives, give the search consequences beyond the solution to a puzzle.
As a spy thriller, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy gets considerable suspense from the everyday labour that more hurried films would skip. Its patience pays off, even if its tangled chronology occasionally does not. Give it an evening when following a difficult conversation sounds more inviting than escaping one, and keep the distractions out of reach.
