Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
It’s Spy vs. Spy in Adaptation of John le Carre Cold War Thriller
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy [2011]
Rated R for violence, profanity, sexuality and nudity.
Running Time: 127 minutes
Distributor: Focus Features
Film Review by Kam Williams
Excellent (4 stars)
Dateline: Budapest, 1973. It is the height of the Cold War, and
British spy Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) has been dispatched behind the Iron
Curtain on a covert, anti-Communist mission. But when the operation is badly
botched, and blood is shed, there are consequences back in London at MI6
headquarters where both the head of the organization (John Hurt) and his
right-hand man, George Smiley (Gary Oldman), are forced to resign in
disgrace.
Yet, it isn’t very long before the latter is secretly rehired by
Undersecretary Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), the member of the Prime
Minister’s cabinet responsible for overseeing the intelligence agency. For,
there is good reason to believe that a Soviet mole has managed to infiltrate
the “Circus,” the government moniker for MI6’s highest echelon. As it turns
out, Prideaux was in Hungary in search of the double agent whose identity
has been narrowed down to one of four suspects referred to by the
surreptitious codenames Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Soldier
(Ciaran Hinds) and Poor Man (David Dencik).
Now, it falls to the wily Smiley to match wits with an equally-savvy,
inscrutable adversary. What makes the protagonist’s task particularly
perilous is that he dare not risk suspicion by confiding in any of his
contacts inside MI6. Instead, as a lone wolf, he must rely on a combination
of a career’s worth of experience and his finely-tuned personal radar to
attempt to ensnare his elusive prey.
Is the traitor the ambitious Percy Alleline (Tinker), the unflappable Bill
Haydon (Tailor), the rough-edged Roy Bland (Soldier) or the officious Toby
Esterhase (Poor Man)? That is the proposition posed by Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy, as spellbinding an espionage thriller as you are ever likely to
encounter in a theater.
That the multi-layered mystery proves so intriguing should be no surprise,
given that it’s based on a labyrinthine best-seller many fans of the genre
consider to be the best spy novel of all time. FYI, author David John Moore
Cornwell, aka John Le Carre, who wrote under a pseudonym as required by
England of its former agents, makes a cameo in the picture as a guest at a
Christmas party.
This adaption is considerably dense compared to the seven-episode miniseries
the BBC shot in 1979 starring Sir Alec Guinness. Nonetheless, director Tomas
Alfredson (Let the Right One In) has painstakingly distilled the 400-page
opus down to its essential elements while remaining ever so faithful to the
source material in terms of tenor and tone.
A well-crafted, harrowing whodunit of Hitchcockian proportions!