The new adaptation of John le Carré's novel is a brilliant study of the disenchantment, compromise and tension of the 1970s spy game
Director Tomas Alfredson came to prominence with Let the Right One In, a story about vampires, but his instinctive, even passionate sympathy for the undead was never better displayed than here. This is a skin-crawlingly atmospheric, uncompromisingly cerebral and austere account of John le Carré's cold war espionage novel, adapted for the screen by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor. Gary Oldman plays the melancholy agent George Smiley, brought out of his humiliating retirement and charged with rooting out a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of the secret service.
Could it be Alleline (Toby Jones), Haydon (Colin Firth), Bland (Ciarán Hinds), Estherhase (David Dencik) – or someone else? Like Michael Corleone contemplating Fredo's duplicity, Smiley's face is a mask of icy determination. He is also suppressing emotional agony. One of these men has betrayed him personally.
When the BBC television adaptation with Alec Guinness was on the air in 1979, this was contemporary drama. Now it's a 70s period piece. Distance lends yet more disenchantment to the view. We are miles away from Bond glamour: defeating the clearly defined bad guy, getting the girl, and so on. This is an arena of shabby compromises enacted by anxious middle-aged men who feel, to quote Kathy Burke's research agent Connie Sachs, "seriously under-fucked". It is a tatty, nasty, shabby and stiflingly male world of beige and grey, seen through a dreary particulate haze – fag-ash and dandruff. The interiors and government offices are lit with a pallid, headachey glow. Every room looks like a morgue, and the corpses are walking around, filling out chits, wearing ill-fitting suits, having whispered conversations, giving and receiving bollockings and worrying about loyalty.
The movie brilliantly conjures up the heavy weather of Le Carré's spy game: it involves nothing like derring-do, but a ritual of humiliation and a ballet of shame in which the security services play their part in managing decline and managing denial, and the Brit spooks try to rebuild their reputation with the Americans – the only people with secrets worth keeping – in their calamitous post-Philby world.
Full review, including clip from movie, at The Guardian.
Could it be Alleline (Toby Jones), Haydon (Colin Firth), Bland (Ciarán Hinds), Estherhase (David Dencik) – or someone else? Like Michael Corleone contemplating Fredo's duplicity, Smiley's face is a mask of icy determination. He is also suppressing emotional agony. One of these men has betrayed him personally.
When the BBC television adaptation with Alec Guinness was on the air in 1979, this was contemporary drama. Now it's a 70s period piece. Distance lends yet more disenchantment to the view. We are miles away from Bond glamour: defeating the clearly defined bad guy, getting the girl, and so on. This is an arena of shabby compromises enacted by anxious middle-aged men who feel, to quote Kathy Burke's research agent Connie Sachs, "seriously under-fucked". It is a tatty, nasty, shabby and stiflingly male world of beige and grey, seen through a dreary particulate haze – fag-ash and dandruff. The interiors and government offices are lit with a pallid, headachey glow. Every room looks like a morgue, and the corpses are walking around, filling out chits, wearing ill-fitting suits, having whispered conversations, giving and receiving bollockings and worrying about loyalty.
The movie brilliantly conjures up the heavy weather of Le Carré's spy game: it involves nothing like derring-do, but a ritual of humiliation and a ballet of shame in which the security services play their part in managing decline and managing denial, and the Brit spooks try to rebuild their reputation with the Americans – the only people with secrets worth keeping – in their calamitous post-Philby world.
Full review, including clip from movie, at The Guardian.
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