COLD WAR COMFORT FOOD: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, dir by Tomas Alfredson, USA/UK, 127mns, def 35mm)

It's funny what movies become comfort foods.

Who would have known thirteen years later that Tomas Alfredson's dense layered adaptation of John Le Carre's famous spy novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY starring a re-energized "I'm here to act!" Gary Oldman would become a go-to re-watchable.

The movie follows Le Carre's famous British spy, George Smiley (ironically named), as he works to find a Soviet double agent (the "mole") at the very top levels of British intelligence in the 1970's.

Director Tomas Alfredson, hot off his native Swedish vampire horror movie LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008, another must-see) brought DP extraordinaire Hoyte Van Hoytema (now shooting for everyone from Christopher Nolan to Jordan Peele) to bring their talents to bear on this unwieldy piece of cold war spy fiction oft found on the bedsides of grandfathers, fathers, and stepfathers everywhere in the 1970's and 1980's.

What a cast. Even author John Le Carre (aka David Cornwell) seated between John Hurt and Gary Oldman seems pleased.

They lean into the smoky, alcoholic, still industrial smoke belching grayness of Britain and Soviet Eastern Europe. But their sense of atmosphere and mood also embraces the sexy sartorial 70's style so that we get shag coats, bespoke suits, etc.

The movie is THE BIG LEBOWSKI of spy movies in that it helps to see it about three times before you can really enjoy it. It's such a dense and layered story that the first watch may find you scrambling to absorb all the narrative threads . .wait who is Karla ? (Smiley's rival and counterpart in Soviet intelligence), are Firth's Bill Haydon and Mark Strong's Jim Predeaux more than friends (they are), why is everyone furious at Tom Hardy's Ricki Tarr (his intelligence work wasn't approved by the higher ups), and so on. 

This is no surprise as the original novel was a dense read itself and took an entire BBC 1970's mini-series (starring Alec Guinness as Smiley) to tell back in the day. Screenwriters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan pull off a nifty bit of condensation by getting the whale bones of the structure down to 2 hours and 7 minutes! 

Colin Firth’s Bill Haydon comes closest to the effortless “James Bond” charm we associate with the UK’s most famous spy. But he turns out, as all the other characters do, to be far more complex.

But it takes about three viewings to fully follow the story which comes at you relentlessly and expects you to keep pace. But by the third viewing, you so follow the story that you're then able to enjoy its many ironies, themes, complexities. 

Like so much great movie work, the spy story is just the surface to an oceanic exploration of dysfunctional love relationships. You don't quite notice this until a few viewings in. But NOBODY has a healthy romantic relationship in this movie. They are either being cheated on, alone, having to hide their true identity (if they're LGBTQ+), enjoying a fleeting dalliance that nevertheless ends in separation and tragedy...

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY is a movie of deep yearning and romantic frustration beneath its deceptively icy spy machinations. 

Yes, Peter. This cast is stacked…

The cast is stacked. How the f' did they get this cast? Gary Oldman anchors everything as a dynamic, brilliant, disciplined, yet possibly too forgiving Smiley. Yet he's still ballasted by a 1927 Yankees murderer's row ensemble: John Hurt as the paranoid "Control" leader of the British Secret Service. Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberpatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Cirian Hinds are all magnetically watchable members of "the Circus", Le Carre's name for British intelligence.

The movie, like Oldman's performance, is understated, dynamic. 

Alfredson and Hoytema employ their strong cinematic sequence/image making approach from LET THE RIGHT ONE IN in a subtler way here. We still get the shocking moments of declarative cinema. In one sequence, Strong's Jim Predeaux, having survived Soviet torture, returns to Britain to become a school teacher. When a white owl suddenly flies down a chimney and into his class, Predeaux takes a stick and kills it with several lethal whacks, mid-air, in front of all the students. It took a few viewings to notice the even more droll, dry touch that Predeaux then stuffs and mounts the bird on a side-wall in his class. 

Wait, what kind of movie is this where Tom Hardy’s character comes off as the most reasonable and laid back…

Even so, the foundational strength of the cinematic style is how it makes its movie language serve the story. Much of the framing of the film is through telephoto lenses which condense space and make everything appear compressed and flat. This helps to make characters feel surrounded, accentuates the paranoia. Many shots are framed through dirty windows, door frames, frames within frames, to give the movie that Pakula-Willis (KLUTE, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN) 70's vibe. 

Even oft-used cinematic language like framing certain characters so we never really see their face is employed masterfully here. The two most ellusive people in Smiley's life are his chief rival, Soviet spymaster Karla, and his unfaithful yet always returning wife, Anne. It takes a few viewings to realize these are the only two characters in the movie whose faces we never get to fully see. 

Just as with the visual style, certain thematic strengths (just like LEBOWSKI) only reveal themselves to you upon re-watch. They don't shout. They whisper.

Along with the dysfunctional personal relationship strand, there is also a surprisingly clear eyed theme that the two sides of the Cold War-the capitalistic democratic West and the communistic concentrated authoritarian Soviet and Chinese states were not as different as they liked to pretend to be. They each had an ugliness beneath the heavy makeup of ideology.

Smiley sees this clearly and tries to communicate this to his chief rival, Soviet Spy Karla. But Karla is a true believer (unlike Smiley). And in one of the most incisive lines of the movie (which often gets overlooked), Smiley says "That's how I know he can be beaten. Because he's a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt." 

Smiley probably does ultimately favor the western approach. But he's clear eyed about its hypocrisies and limitations. He doesn't pretend it's an evolved system. 

So that ultimately, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY is a brilliant movie because it is a movie of surprising psychological insight and depth. It uses a thrilling atmospheric spy story to really tell a story of how we all suffer and yearn and strive and long for connection. And in doing so, are often betrayed or lied to or deceived or do the deceiving.

Spies are exaggerated avatars of all of us. Imperfect. Flawed. Human. Weak. But acknowledging that, some of us can still get things done.

Like Smiley.

Craig Hammill is the founder.principal.head programmer of Secret Movie Club.