Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Grade A

A

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Benedict Cumberbatch. Director Tomas Alfredson.

Gary Oldman gives a loving homage to Alec Guinness, who played the main character in the 1979 BBC television series based on the John Le Carre novel. I never thought anyone could play that role again after Guinness. But Oldman absolutely nails it, even down to the exact pace of speech.

George Smiley (Oldman) is retired MI6, brought out of retirement by the chief, who is dying, to find a Soviet mole in the spy agency during the Cold War. Smiley learns there are six main suspects the chief had been considering, one of them himself. In only a little over 2 hours of screen time, he finds the traitor.

The original BBC story took 7 hours to tell, so it is a remarkable screenwriting achievement to tell the same story in only 2 hours. But as a consequence, the plot is more impressionistic than detailed. Brief scenes hint at relationships that are important but which cannot be spelled out due to the time constraint. Six suspects, after all, is a lot of suspects for one mystery story. Plus, there is the matter of Smiley’s estranged wife, which figures importantly in the story.

But the screenplay is masterful and does its job. I wondered if anyone not familiar with the book or the BBC series would be able to follow the complicated story, and I worried if the movie would make money because of that. But it is making truckloads of money, so I guess it works.

There are some important changes from the original book and series. Some locations are changed (e.g., Hungary instead of Czechoslovakia), and the ending is new, rushed, and a bit contrived, somewhat anticlimactic for that. But overall the story is faithful in spirit to the original (Le Carre is credited as a producer). The music is beautiful, very restrained, and entirely fitting. Costumes and sets are perfection. Cinematography is careful and not a shot is wasted, so I guess that means the editing is also excellent.

At first I resisted Oldman, because I wanted so badly to see Guinness again. But he’s dead, so get over it, I thought, and very soon I accepted Oldman as George Smiley. If he can win me over, he can convince anybody.

Body of Lies: Grade B

B
Body of Lies (2008)
Russell Crowe; Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Strong. Director Ridley Scott.

This CIA spy thriller set in the middle east delivers the action and suspense we expect from Ridley Scott. DiCaprio is a field agent who has a lead to a big, bad Arab terrorist lynchpin that the CIA has not been able to find or identify. To get to this bad guy, DiCaprio must maintain the trust of the head of Jordanian intelligence, well played by Strong. However, DiCaprio’s CIA boss in Langley (Crowe) keeps meddling in the plan, disrupting the operation whenever he tries to “help,” causing breach of trust with the spymaster in Amman.

DiCaprio meets an attractive girl there, which is as good as stamping “hostage” across her forehead. There are suitable fiery explosions that blow out whole buildings, aerial surveillance drones, machine gun battles, frantic chases through crowded markets, and so on. Locations seemed real because of the lighting and city scenes, and were attractive. Sound engineering was particularly detailed. I appreciate hearing brass shell casings hit the ground. However, it was not convincing for DiCaprio and Crowe to have instantaneous, secure, and perfectly clear conversations across half the world on their cell phones (no doubt they were “special” phones) nor that CIA staff could sit omnisciently in a video paneled room counting every whisker on DiCaprio’s chin. Acting by DiCaprio was mature and convincing, and Crowe really shone as the southern-drawling, dumb-as-a-fox CIA spymaster. The movie was intellectually engaging and suitably kinetic but not thematically serious. It is just an adventure for the sake of adventure, though well-done for its genre.

Traitor: Grade B

B
Traitor (2008)
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels; Co-Writer & Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

You’ll need motion-sickness medication to watch this movie. The camera swoops, spins, tracks and zooms dizzyingly in every scene. Fast pans move from one close up shot to another so quickly you can hardly tell what you’re looking at and if you try to follow the motion your eyes will cross. The movements are completely gratuitous, seriously detracting from the film. When it is not swooping around, the camera is hand held, jumping and jittering wildly with the action but incomprehensibly, shot from no consistent point of view. This syntax of camera-as-character is common in television, but usually done more intelligently. But all is not lost, for in the last 1/3 of the film they apparently changed personnel and the movie settles down to a much more enjoyable, professional looking work. You just have to make it through the first hour.

And you should try, for this is basically a good movie. Don Cheadle is a deep undercover agent for the US Government, penetrating a terrorist organization based in Yemen. His undercover status is not revealed for the first 45 minutes, (although I guessed it right away -- he is Don Cheadle, after all), so we first get to know him as an explosives dealer who also instructs his customers in making bombs and suicide vests. Taghmaoui is the militant Islamic extremist who Cheadle befriends. To earn his bones, Cheadle must blow up an American embassy in Europe, which causes him a crisis of conscience, and we learn that his character really is a devout Muslim, not just an undercover pretender. Acting is consistently superb throughout. The dialog is intelligent and the story is engaging. However, sets, scenes and costumes are so self-consciously overdone that they are unconvincing. It is courageous of Cheadle to put his career at risk by playing an Islamic terrorist but he plays it extremely well, so much so that we can understand the point of view of the anti-American Islamic extremists. Despite its flaws, good acting and a good story make the move worth seeing.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold: Grade A

A
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (2008)
Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Oskar Werner; Director Martin Ritt.

This “Criterion” release of the 1965 Le Carre film adaptation is a feast for the eyes. The film is perfectly restored, and black and white has never looked so good. It is stunningly beautiful and perfectly suited to the film noir genre and to the cold war 1960’s. Burton is very good in this role, but I think he was overrated. His acting seems flat and manufactured to me, although some of that is the character portrayed, and some of it legacy of the stage. Claire Bloom does a good job but Oskar Werner’s performance is riveting. For fans of Le Carre, this is a perfect adaptation. It captures the tension, the emotions, and the moral ambiguities of the novel and of that period of history. British spy Leamus (Burton) is supposed to act like a defector to give the East Germans some misinformation in Amsterdam. But they whisk him off to East Berlin and he learns that the British have abandoned him, so he now really is the traitor he was pretending to be. I love the way Le Carre can turn the world inside out like that.

There is a second disk in this edition showing a long, recent interview with Le Carre in which he discusses the making of the film, working with Burton and Ritt; all fascinating stuff, especially where it highlights the different points of view of a writer and a filmmaker. Then there is longish feature which is Le Carre’s autobiography told through film adaptations of his novels, focusing of course on the autobiographical, A Perfect Spy. It seems he has been self-aware all his life (the hindsight of age encourages that view), and exquisitely attuned to subtleties of the human condition. Then there is an extensive 1967 interview with Burton, who is fascinating and disturbing. And much more. Even if you have seen the original movie more than once, this Criterion edition is well worth renting.