Tomas Alfredson’s cinematic adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy immerses itself in the murkiness and gloom of John le Carré’s Cold War novels. Dense, deliberate and cerebral, it is as fine a movie made from a Le Carré novel as we have seen since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1964.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy closely follows the tangled plot of Le Carré’s book. Veteran spy George Smiley and his boss Control, the head of the British Intelligence service, are drummed out of the organisation in disgrace after a covert operation in Hungary goes awry. But Smiley is soon called out of retirement to track down a double agent working for Moscow, who has embedded himself in the upper ranks of “the Circus”.

There are five suspects identified and code-named by Control before his death: the ambitious climber Percy Alleline (“tinker”); the urbane “tailor”, Bill Haydon; the reliable “soldier” Roy Bland; the officious “poorman”, Toby Esterhase; and Smiley, the “beggarman”. Smiley, compelled by his sense of duty, digs deep into the barrel to find the bad apple.

Tinker Tailor is faithful to the bleak tone of Le Carré’s books and their moral ambivalence. With their complex explorations of morality and their themes of the conflict between loyalty to friends and faithfulness to a job, Le Carré’s novels have always called to mind Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene rather than Ian Fleming.

Espionage in Tinker Tailor is nothing like the bone-crunching heroics of Jason Bourne and the guns, girls and glamour of James Bond. Just as in Le Carré’s novels, it is underpaid, grubby men in civil service offices that fight the Cold War by shuffling paper around rather than dashing, globetrotting secret agents equipped with exotic gadgets. In this world, sex and violence are seldom without consequence.

Gary Oldman’s Oscar-nominated performance as George Smiley is the cornerstone of the film. Cuckolded, middle-aged and mild-mannered, Smiley is the opposite of the archetypal action hero. His weapons against his enemies are not brawn nor firepower, but the sharp and calculating mind hidden behind his unassuming demeanour.

Oldman’s performance is equally good at showing the intelligence and sometimes ruthless pragmatism of the man as well the gray, downbeat appearance that makes him seem so unthreatening to his quarry. Smiley is a man of complex emotions who seldom shows them, but Oldman ferments them quietly under his character’s surface.

Alfredson, the Swedish director of Let the Right One In, heads an immaculate Anglo production, with sets beautifully dressed in period detail, each shot carefully framed and an excellent British cast. It is a handsome film, brimming over with incidental detail and thick with frigid Cold War atmosphere.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy trailer (via YouTube):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco15ScXCwA

Some critics found Tinker Tailor a little emotionally cold, but I thought that it slowly peeled away its layers of a mystery in a thoroughly engrossing manner. Though there isn’t much action, there is plenty of low-key suspense of a sort we seldom seem in film today, such as a nail-biting scene where Smiley’s understudy has to steal a file from a busy office.

Tinker Tailor’s script is a remarkable feat of abridgment. The film moves at a quick pace, yet shouldn’t confuse those who haven’t read the book as long as they concentrate. It masterfully crams a dense novel into a two-hour movie that is satisfies nearly as much as the celebrated BBC mini-series from 1979. — Lance Harris, TechCentral