Film review: ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’

Gary Oldman is not a spy you want to mess with in ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’.

By Josh Bell

Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012 | 5:05 p.m.

The secret agents in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are never involved in explosions or car chases, and many of them don’t even use guns. The majority of the intrigue in the movie based on John le Carré’s 1974 novel involves paperwork and hushed conversations, but it’s as engrossing as any action-packed espionage thriller, and more rewarding in the end. The novel was adapted into a seven-part miniseries for British TV in 1979, and the film manages to compress the story without ever feeling rushed or incomplete.

Director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan trust the audience to put the pieces of the story together, jumping right in as taciturn British intelligence officer George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is being forced into retirement along with his boss (John Hurt) following an operation gone wrong in Budapest. Smiley doesn’t have much time to enjoy (or stoically endure) retirement before he’s called back to duty to run a clandestine mission to seek out a Soviet mole at the highest levels of British intelligence. With the help of a younger agent (Benedict Cumberbatch), Smiley hones in on four potential targets who could be feeding information to the Russians.

The particulars of the plot are familiar from any number of spy thrillers, but Alfredson executes them masterfully, parceling out just enough information to string the audience along, without ever resorting to hand-holding or cheap fake-outs. The movie is as methodical as the meticulous, melancholy Smiley, who conducts his investigation with dour determination as he quietly seethes over the recent departure of his wife. Oldman, who’s given dozens of over-the-top performances, is remarkably restrained as Smiley, keeping all of his resentments and regrets bottled up and letting them show only in brief moments. Alfredson’s cool, detached aesthetic, augmented by brilliant production design and fluid cinematography, nicely complements the emotional remove of the characters, and when a tense situation does arise, the movie makes it count. Possibly the most suspenseful sequence involves getting a certain file into a briefcase and out of a building; like everything else in the movie, it’s a small-scale act with large-scale impact.