On DVD Now: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

John le Carré can spin a whale of a cold war spy story. Take The Spy Who Came in from the Cold for example, it doesn’t get much better.

In his writing, le Carré fills the page with excellent prose, efficient, minimal dialog and he paints a dreary scene beautifully. He populates the story with a broad cast of characters, most of them minor, but none wasted.

I could go on cooing like this if I were reviewing his books, but sadly, I’m not.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was filmed in 2011, but set in the early seventies, around the time the book was written. You remember the seventies don’t you? The cold war, the global tensions, the secret battles fought between agents of the superpowers?

If you don’t, then this movie will have very little meaning to you.

FLR-9 Antenna array, Misawa AB Japan c. 1980

On the other hand, old farts like me will recall the era well. Some of us even served in one capacity or another as soldiers in the cold war. We were constantly briefed on the dangers and clever, devious shenanigans of Spy vs. Spy encounters. We were to report any strange contacts, especially with too-curious strangers with accents. My own role was never front line - James Bond stuff, just a technician in support of an electronic eavesdropping operation. Hardly clandestine, the site I was at was well established, and its mission was well known. The Godless commies knew we were listening, as we knew they were listening to us. That was part of the conundrum, the paradox, the duality of cold war Spy vs. Spy.

By the seventies the cold war was twenty years in, rules of engagement established, entire careers contained within that framework. That era was also economically stagnant and politically corrupt. In the U.S. as well as our western allied nations, unrest had surged, activists set fires, riot-geared police and national guard troops quashed large protest rallies with teargas and rubber (mostly) bullets. The innocent fifties and age of Camelot and Aquarius had subsided, the world simmered in a stew of paranoia, unease and restlessness. The once proud intelligence agencies were starting to unravel, interventions had loudly and publicly backfired, good intentions soured with age.

Thus is the backdrop for Tinker, Tailor. . .

MI6, the Circus, The U.K.’s once vaunted foreign espionage office is in the throes of a catastrophic and embarrassing international incident, heads rolled, loyalties vanished, leaving the politicos and department heads rushing toward the exits.

‘Control’ (John Hurt) Is canned, as is his much less gregarious ally, Smiley (Gary Oldman).

With the death of the old department head, Smiley is called back in from retirement to hunt down a mole, an unknown Soviet agent within the highest echelons of the Circus.

Hilarity does not ensue.

This is a serious, somber, dark and dreary tale of treachery, espionage and epidemic distrust. Nothing that is meant is said, and nothing that is said is without motive and double or triple entendre.

This is managed very well in le Carré’s books. Not so much in the film adaptation. As a book, outlined with the author’s rich writing, you ride along with the characters, get to know them as they creep in and out of dank shadows. In this film they walk on, deliver some lines, and make prolonged facial expressions, mostly in silence.

Gary Oldman does this to perfection. His character you get. You know there’s much more going on in his mind then most mere mortals merely watching the flick will ever comprehend. The other characters, scores of them, come and go. We’re supposed to be engaged, aiding in the hunt, figuring out who’s lying, who’s betraying whom.

I understand the period, the agencies, the tensions, of the era. I’ve read dozens of novels about the time and the global intrigue presented. I should be the target audience for this work.

Yet I drifted. Too many characters, too many sub-plots, too many complex relationships. I even mentioned to Angel that to keep up with the story that it might be wise to start taking notes. Everyone in the film had code names and human names and those were bandied about interchangeably. The dialog was mostly whispered, always guarded. By the second hour I’d started getting easily distracted by a couple of moths flitting around the lights. By the second half of the second hour, I’d gone to bed. On my way I mentioned to Angel the character I suspected was the mole, based not on the clues in the story line, that was deliberately written evasively. I made my pick based on the star-power among of the cast of suspects. You don’t blow big dollars on xxxxxxxxx just to have him end up as an also-ran. I was proven right.

The movie is slow, whispery, drab, and populated mostly by sleazy middle aged British men, fops. The kind of cold, calculating, understating, humorless men that most of us have virtually no interest in and cannot identify with, and are wholly unable to stir up any feelings for. Executive and bureaucratic spies ordering hits on and ratting out other spies is about as empathy-vacant as brutish thugs bumping off other brutish thugs, but without the gory, bloody footwork and fisticuffs.

I don’t walk out on very many movies, especially cold-war spy movies, but this acclaimed work failed from the beginning to get even a modest rise out of me. I didn’t care, couldn’t be bothered with the effort of sorting out the twisted storyline, and was bored by the multi-layered, deliberately deceptive, plodding pace.

Angel thought better of the film than I, she stuck with it to the end, and though she said she enjoyed it, there was reservation in her remarks. There was no high praise, only a lack of tangible dislike.

Once again, a movie that I wanted to like. The cast was first-rate, the cinematography captured the era splendidly, no expense was spared to make it look and feel like the time and place. But it simply lacked the symphonic pacing and intricacy required to maintain interest in an eventual crescendo. Like a Beethoven work without the brass, tympani and crashing cymbals, nothing but strings and woodwinds pointing and counterpointing for two hours before eventually just stopping.
Go ahead and watch it, but have a crossword puzzle on hand.