Tinker Tailor Soldier... Huh?

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
By Jonathan Fisher, September 27, 2011

Here's a dilemma -- is it possible to regard a film as competently produced and performed while feeling absolutely nothing for it? Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has a ridiculous pedigree. It's like the cutest pure-bred puppy you've ever seen. Just looking at it, you know that the people that created it knew what they were doing. Directed by the consummate Swede Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, John Hurt, and Ciaran Hinds, and based upon the legendary book by former real-life spy John Le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy invites high expectations.



I didn't understand it. I understood it -- the characters were speaking eloquent English, and the subtitles were coherent -- but I was at a complete loss narratively. I understood the basic premise -- MI6 agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is brought back from the brink of retirement to uncover the identity of a Soviet mole working in the upper echelons of the agency's management at the height of the Cold War.


A movie is (or should be, anyway) about so much more than what it's about, so I can forgive a little narrative fuzziness here and there. I also accept that some movies just require you to concentrate really, really hard to know what is going on. Some movies even wilfully refuse to pander to the average viewer's preconceptions of what a 'plot' should be and how it should unfold (think Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an excerpt of which is below).

That's fine. In Tarkovsky's case, more than fine. The guy was a visionary genius, and not in the way that Zack Snyder is a visionary for directing 300. The problem I had with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, however, is that it's just obtuse. There are so many middle-aged men that look almost exactly the same, with similar-sounding names, and the movie is so reliant on dialogue (i.e. some of these middle-aged, bland-looking characters talking about the other middle-aged, bland-looking characters) that it's nigh impossible to tell who is who and who did what to who.

I did read the novel, many years ago. I vaguely recalled the key events of the story. I was still disadvantaged by the somnambulant, verbose style of story-telling. I was also shocked that Tomas Alfredson, who so beautifully directed the Swedish vampire story Let the Right One In, opted for such a bland style. Is it the language barrier? Perhaps. The visuals of this movie (visuals are, of course, the language of cinema that transcends dialect) are brilliant. The threatening shades of brown, the framing of the world closing in on these paranoid people trying to second-guess everyone around them. That stuff is all gorgeous. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy gets the music right, but not the words.

Editor's note: I am fully aware that John Le Carre has an accent acute over the last e. I can't, for the life of me, work out how to insert one of these into a Blogger post without ruining the html and thus the look of the entire post. I'd love it for a reader to enlighten me.