Two sequences in the recent film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (John le Carre’s 1974 espionage novel) sum up the film’s aching thesis — that the Cold War-era intelligence business was a zero-sum game that consumed all its players, either through violence or loss of humanity.
The first — a slow, foreboding countdown that sets the plot in motion and makes for the film’s only action sequence — depicts an English spy sent on a doomed mission to Hungary. Shot with an unsettling score and long, nerve racking shots of all parties involved, we feel the dread of the unlucky agent long before he realizes he’s been set up for doom, and we realize that even if this particular mission had ended better, his is an existence fraught with paranoia and knowledge of the eventuality of his own demise.
The second sequence involves George Smiley (Gary Oldman), the film’s central character (in a film as deliberately grim and joyless as this, the word “hero” seems not to fit). Smiley describes to a younger agent a failed attempt to turn a captured Russian agent into a defector. Speaking with a weary resignation, Smiley recounts the practiced (if not effective) hard sell he delivered. ”Don’t you think it’s time to recognize there’s as little worth on your side as there is on mine?” he asked.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a deliberate counterpoint to the James Bond/Jason Bourne view of espionage. The film (released in Britain in 2011, and now in wide release in the US after several weeks of limited engagements in major cities) depicts a bloodless, proper world in which spies on both sides exist only to maintain each other’s mutually assured misery. There are no explosions, daring escapes, fun gadgets, or “Bond girls”; instead, Tinker Tailor is populated with doughy, buttoned-up middle-aged bureaucrats as concerned with fighting each other for power inside their offices as they are with fighting Soviet intelligence.
As the picture opens, Oldman’s Smiley is a mute, powerless middle man who, blamed for the aforementioned botched operation, is set adrift from his post in British intelligence. Far from the smooth world-bending operation portrayed in the Bond films, MI6 here is depicted as a backstabbing, chaotic mess of an operation, nicknamed “Circus.” Its denizens bicker about project funding and supervision, even as they try to root out the mole responsible for the film’s opening shooting.
Oldman leads a cast of all-stars from the other side of the pond, including Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, and John Hurt. All wear an expression of weary resignation in most every scene of the film. Oldman, in particular, specializes in depicting a sad devotion to duty. His Smiley realizes that catching the bad guy won’t result in a triumphant climax to the film, and certainly not in bedding a buxom femme fatale — just the privilege of working another day in the dreary prison that is the world of espionage.
