Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Old School
"We've spent our lives looking for the weakness in one another's systems. Don't you think it's time to recognize there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine?"
I went back this week to my old journalism school at Ohio State. I hadn't set foot in the building in more than 30 years. So it was with a mixture of excitement, nostalgia and some trepidation that I entered.
I was there to speak to a group of journalism students. Dutifully, I had prepared an outline. Life lessons from a career in journalism, I fancied it. The real stories. The hard truths about the business. Then I sat and spoke for an hour, staring at their young faces and wondered if any of my words were registering. Or was I just another older person telling them how difficult the world could be? Maybe they had already had enough of that.
In the end, I realized that there was no way to impart my experience upon them. The gulf between our frames of reference was too great. I was not their peer no more than than they were mine. Hopefully, they chuckled quietly at some of the jokes at least.
Experience is a tricky thing in our time. In my line of work, the right amount can make you a trusted veteran. Or it can make you a prime target for budget-trimming. Like those journalism students, at some point nobody wants to hear anymore what it was like when Reagan was president or about 9/11 or the way Obama rocked the country. You're a vendor of old news that no one is much interested in buying amid a world where algorithms continuously provide fresh, new content.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is all about one such veteran, a man whose time has seemingly passed. George Smiley, as played by Gary Oldman, is a longtime spymaster for British intelligence, part of a London bureaucracy known internally as "The Circus." It's the early 1970s, when the glamour of the jet-set days of the Cold War has faded like the office carpeting. The mission has become muddled, plagued by mistrust, in-fighting and careerist jockeying. "We should be fighting the Communists, not each other," one of the managers says at one point.
This is a boys' club of the highest order, the finest products of the British elite gathered around tables in soundproof rooms wearing houndstooth and chain-smoking. But rot has settled in. When an operation in Budapest goes horribly wrong, Smiley and his patron, the section mastermind known as "Control" (and played the wonderfully reptilian John Hurt), are pushed out. Their time has ended. A new generation, represented by the likes of Colin Firth's Bill Haydon, is ready to take over.
Smiley, seemingly, no longer has anything to offer. And it seems he doesn't have much to live for. His wife has left. And he is the kind of man who even without a job still wakes up in the morning and dresses for the day, even if it is meant to be spent staring out the window.
But he is soon thrown a lifeline. A deputy minister calls him in and tells him there's a Soviet mole within The Circus, and Smiley must identify him in what amounts to an off-book investigation. It's imperative, Smiley is told. The Americans no longer trust Britain's ability to keep its house in order, and MI6 risks being cut out of the intelligence loop. Nothing less than the country's tattered pride is on the line.
This was post-Imperial Britain. The years after World War II had seen its global influence wane in favor of the United States as that country transformed itself into a military-industrial colossus. Even the days of Swinging London were long gone. The country was battered by economic strife and fading industrial might. The skies seemed terminally gray. The moral clarity the war had provided had yielded to shadows.1
As opposed to the stasis of the Cold War, World War II, was “a real war” retired intelligence analyst Connie Sachs tells Smiley. “Englishmen could be proud then.”
Smiley becomes, for the purposes of the story, a detective. And Oldman’s performance is a marvel of restraint, opacity and inner ferocity, almost the polar opposite of the operative he plays now on Apple TV’s (terrific) “Slow Horses.” His eyes clouded by thick lenses, Smiley reveals almost nothing about his inner workings. But he is always watching and studying. Experience has given him patience. More than that, it’s given him the key to unraveling the riddle; more than anyone else in the service, he understands their Russian adversary. ‘I know he can be beaten,” Smiley says at one point. “Because he's a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
There is a coda at the end of the film once the puzzle has been solved that is so subtle that it is easily missed. Smiley returns home to find a woman, his wife of course, sitting in the kitchen. He pauses in the hall unseen and for a slight moment grasps the bannister of the stairway to steady himself. That is all he will allow himself.
The film is based on the novel by famed British espionage writer John le Carre. (This is already the second time we’ve done a le Carre adapatation for Nuclear Theater.) He specialized in exploring the unheroic underbelly of the spy trade, the futility of its machinations and the insistent crush of bureaucracy. Fittingly, the director, Tomas Alfredson, shoots the film as largely a series of small rooms and close encounters. Every character seems boxed in one way or another, insulated from the outside world. These men are grand only in their minds, Alfredson seems to be saying. Mostly, they are small-minded and confined.
The cast is a U.K. murderers’ row: Beyond Oldman, Hurt and Firth, there’s Tom Hardy as a rogue agent, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s young protege, Ciaran Hinds and Toby Jones as other MI6 functionaries and Simon McBurney as a weasily deputy minister who steals every scene he’s in. The film is exceptional piece of work.
But this is largely Oldman’s — and Smiley’s — show. And from this old dog’s perch, there is indeed some satisfaction to be found at the film’s final scene, where George Smiley gets what has long been coming to him. It’s a hopeful note on which to end.
WHERE CAN I WATCH IT: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is rentable on all major platforms.
HEY ISN’T THAT: Ok, it’s not high art or anything but if you have seen Simon McBurney in anything else, it’s probably as the British official who Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt impersonates at the end of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation. For my money, it’s the best of the highly enjoyable film series.
ARMAGEDDON INDEX: 3/10: The calls were coming from inside the house.
DUST CLOUDS: Le Carre wrote Tinker Tailor Solider Spy in 1974 in the wake of the slow revelation that several members of British intelligence has been working for the Soviets since before World War II. The best known of the so-called “Cambridge Four” (later revised to five) was Kim Philby, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1963.
WHAT ELSE I’M WATCHING: TV: “Slow Horses” (S4, Apple TV), “Bad Monkey” (S1, Apple TV). Movies: The Harder They Fall (Robson 1956).
PERSONAL NOTE: It’s been a busy month, what with the election bearing down and my getting my daughter off to school. I’m hoping to return to a more regular schedule soon. Bear with us!
LAST ENTRY: Hail, Caesar! (2016)
NEXT ENTRY: Jet Pilot (1957)
The director, Tomas Alfredson, said he based the film’s muted palette on his own memories visiting London in the 1970s: "If you see London now and at that time, it's two different cities. Today it's a white city; then it was black; it was so dirty, and you could still feel the War all around."
Speaking of the Cambridge Five: Have you watched Another Country (1984), based loosely on Guy Burgess, one of the five? Excellent period piece, with Rupert Everett, Cary Elwes, and Colin Firth in his movie debut. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086904