Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

It took close to five hours to squeeze John le Carré's bestselling novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy into its first screen adaptation (a television miniseries), so you know there's a whole lot of condensing going on in Tomas Alfredson's big screen version that just barely pushes a more modest two hours. Information is packed into every nook and cranny of this impressive adaptation that benefits from some creative and crafty narrative narrowing. The efforts by Alfredson and screenwriters Bridget O'Conner and Peter Straughan are quite impressive, given how precise their cuts and tweaks prove to be throughout. They're constantly breaking down a scene to its bare bones and then reducing it further, to a conversation, to a glance, to a gesture. That they accomplish this without preventing the theme of paranoia from protruding ensures that this Tinker Tailor is a fine example of appropriate abridging.

Despite the leaner running time, the plot remains almost entirely intact. It's just tighter (though certainly not quicker). George Smiley (Gary Oldman, a worthy replacement for Alec Guinness, who was the highlight of the otherwise drab miniseries) is pulled out of retirement to help uncover a mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service that le Carré playfully referred to as the Circus. George's mission (and he is more than happy to accept it) is to piece together the mystery through various conversations and Circus-related documents. He doesn't have to get too angry or do anything brash like start threatening someone with a gun, which works perfectly fine for George. He's a listener, a watcher.

So Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy happily settles into its slow pace and brooding tone, where much of the movie resides. George sits back and lets various people tell him stories as he methodically pieces the puzzle together. From here, Alfredson employs flashbacks, like jolts of memory, to fill in a few blanks and illustrate a time when the Circus group was a pleasant bunch. They're all wound up now and rightfully so. The noose is tightening around someone's neck and none of the suspects seem particularly willing to cooperate with George and aid his investigation. There's Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), the new head of the Circus who took over from George's deceased friend Control (John Hurt), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), who lives up to his name, Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), who may as well be a lackey of sorts, and Bill Haydon (Colin Firth), a charming playboy with a nasty smirk.

The mystery of the mole comes down to those four men and so George may as well just a pull a name out of a hat. The odds aren't bad, but he insists on finding the absolute truth, which leads to the point where the story stumbles. In le Carré's novel, the potential suspect characters are all a little too obvious. It becomes frustratingly easy to guess who the mole is, because le Carré's use of red herrings is so blatant. He guides us to the guilty character and fails to unearth any surprises with the reveal. But Alfredson's movie handles the mole's identity in an opposite manner. This version hides the peripheral characters so well that it becomes difficult to discern who could actually be the villain. We have less information about the potential moles and therefore we never have both feet on the path to the point that the storytellers can try to throw us off it.

This means that Alfredson succeeds in avoiding the predictability of the conclusion, but then he runs into another problem. Since the mole suspects are all reduced to such small, background fixture roles, the reveal carries next to no dramatic weight. In this situation, it doesn't really matter who the mole is, because the identity can be applied to any of the suspects without altering much of the emotional impact. It's a bit of a dead end for the movie, much like with the novel, only for completely different reasons. But I guess I can't have it both ways (I condemn the reveal for giving too much information in one instance and not enough in another) and le Carré's novel isn't a triumph of plot, but of prose.

In that sense, Alfredson captures the spirit of the novel and therefore his adaptation overcomes the challenges of the flat ending by translating le Carré's wonderful words into an exquisite marriage of sound and imagery. Dialogue escapes each actor's lips with crisp clarity and seemingly small noises, like footsteps or the sound of a cup connecting with its saucer, seem to echo loudly in the thick fog of paranoia. The soft hues of Hoyte Van Hoytema's photography lend the movie an intriguing visual style that feels true to the early 70s setting. A very limited colour palette manages to still appear refreshing as Hoytema pulls interesting textures to the surface.

Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is certainly not without some flaws (the inventive condensing takes a backseat later in the movie and it does enter tedious territory as a result), but it's a very classy effort anchored by a greatly gripping performance at its core. Oldman is surrounded by several solid actors (Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, and Benedict Cumberbatch are all excellent alongside those already mentioned), but it is his take on George Smiley that commands our attention. His calm demeanour is fascinating to watch as the pressure mounts. And perhaps most exciting of all is the work of production designer Maria Djurkovic, whose sets reek of low-tech simplicity and yet still achieve a masterfully memorable uniqueness that feels utterly integral to the story. Like George's mission, this spy movie is all about the details. It's exciting that there are so many of them, all crammed into this condensed cocktail. It doesn't really keep us guessing, but it definitely keeps us watching.