Director Tomas Alfredson’s Cold War-era cure for insomnia “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” attempts to balance dispassionate detachment from the subject material with close-ups of middle-aged British men sitting in offices while looking contemplative. It’s as exciting as it sounds.
Alfredson’s strategic miscalculation is further compounded by the fact that the aforementioned middle-aged men are none other than the woefully underused acting heavyweights Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and John Hurt. Alfredson’s direction strives for understatement and nuance. However, his glacial pacing throttles the life out of his actors.
Set in London during the early 1970s, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” begins with Control (Hurt) imparting his suspicion that the Russians have planted a double agent in the upper echelons of British Secret Intelligence Service, MI-6. Control sends agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to meet with a Hungarian general willing to release the name of the double agent. The plan goes awry when the Russians lay a trap to shoot and capture Prideaux before he gets a name from the general.
The plot inexplicably fast-forwards to the aftermath of the agency following Prideaux’s disappearance. This leaves retired agent George Smiley (Oldman) to piece together the identity of the mole-like Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II” through a series of interviews and poorly defined flashbacks.
The straight-faced (and ironically named) Smiley would make for an intriguing character if the audience were shown some glimpse of his reputation or capabilities. Instead, the audience is saddled with a protagonist more nebulous than mysterious and certainly not interesting enough to shoulder the film’s 128-minute runtime.
Even more problematic than a milquetoast for a hero in a globetrotting spy thriller is the lack of danger presented. When novelist John le Carre wrote “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” in 1974, a Russian spy embedded in British Intelligence was a contemporary threat relevant to readers. However, director Alfredson neglects nearly 40 years of perspective and fails to compensate for the knowledge that the Soviet Union loses the Cold War by establishing an emotional connection to any of the characters.
Alfredson, who directed the masterful Swedish vampire story “Let the Right One In,” used the same techniques in “Tinker Tailor” for the wrong effect. Whereas the deliberate pace and emotional detachment of the children in “Let the Right One In” reinforced those characters’ sense of isolation, the clinical perspective Alfredson brings to a cloak-and-dagger story makes a fascinating subject dull and impenetrable.
