Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

Here are my notes for this week's film which we're screening on Thursday:

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy

UK 2011                      127 minutes

Director:                      Tomas Alfredson

Starring:                        Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberpatch, Kathy Burke, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Toby Jones

Nominations and Awards

• Three Oscar Nominations including Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay
• 11 BAFTA nominations including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (Benedict Cumberpatch and Tom Hardy), Best Supporting Actress (Kathy Burke) and Best Adapted Screenplay
• A further eight wins and 27 nominations

“The genius of Alfredson's film is that despite the fabulously evocative period detail (you can smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the yellowing wallpaper) and the pervasive cold war dread, this adaptation of John le Carré's well-loved bestseller is not about spies at all. Just as Let the Right One In presented a surreptitious study of repressed childhood anger disguised in the garb of a neo-gothic vampire tale, so Tinker Tailor buries its central theme of male distrust, duplicity and anxious misidentification within the labyrinthine twists of an international counter-intelligence yarn.”

Mark Kermode

George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is called out of his enforced retirement to identify a Soviet mole who has infiltrated the upper reaches of the secret service.

The film is based on John Le Carré’s 1974 thriller which was famously adapted for television in 1979 with Alec Guinness playing Smiley.  Le Carré had been so impressed by Guinness's performance that he based his characterisation of Smiley in subsequent novels on Guinness.  Oldman was initially diffident about taking the role because of the long shadow cast by Guinness, but he had the support of Le Carré himself, who simply advised him to return to the character described in the novel and use his imagination.  The film also includes casting in depth for many of the supporting roles, with actors of the calibre of John Hurt, Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberpatch playing relatively minor parts.

The TV version had seven episodes to unravel the labyrinthine plot so with the constraints of a feature film the screenwriters had to adopt a different approach, as scriptwriter Peter Straughan explained:

“The adaptation ... involved a kind of mosaic work.  Some long sequences would remain intact ... but in other cases we would take a line or an event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right.  The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality.”

Following the international critical and commercial success of this film there have been stories in the press that Oldman is interested in playing Smiley again in a film of Smiley’s People, Le Carré’s sequel to Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy and once again memorably filmed for TV with Alec Guinness in the title role.

Here's the trailer: