Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Indian Express rating: ****

A tune heard over the phone,a buzzing fly,a moving curtain,a face that lingers for just a while at the window. If it’s atmosphere you want,it’s atmosphere you get in this adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,considered one of John le Carre’s greatest works.

It marked the return of George Smiley,the non-descript but dependable British intelligence officer. Once one of the highest ranking in the service or the ‘Circus’,and considered the chief or ‘Control’s’ own man,he has been unceremoniously removed since a mysterious operation went bust in Czechoslovakia.

Now suddenly a rumour of a mole in the Circus has got stronger,with various events that have happened at the service tying up with these suspicions. Smiley,now an outsider,is considered the best person to investigate the same.

Like Le Carre’s other novels,Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is less about spying and more about espionage,or the world in which it exists. It elaborates in great detail and at great length the various levels of its operatives,the “scalp hunters”,the “limelighters”,the “agents”,the moles and the various shades of them,the “stock”,the “trade”.

Not just that,a reading of Le Carre’s books is a reading of a Cold War world where the war is both an immediate memory and a likely possibility. His is a world of old men,men who have lived their lives in too much danger to laugh at the possibility of it,or to reconcile with the absence of it. It is also the world of a British intelligence trying to cling on to its relevance in a world suddenly swept by its upstart colony to the west,even as Russia is expanding its influence in the east.

Don’t go looking for this in the film,which apart from the book has to contend with an acclaimed BBC series starring Alec Guinness for comparison. It isn’t easy to encapsulate that world within world here,so this script by Bridget O’ Connor and Peter Straughan that very nicely mines it and abridges it,has to be congratulated for managing to tell the story of it.

To give us men who revel in the roles the book imagines of them – the worker,the toiler,the braggart,the loyalist,the risk-taker,the brash,and the flashy one. To give us spies who worked with papers and memory,documents and film,rather than guns and threats. And to give us actors who lift the plot where it threatens to sag and even redefine their characters from the story to make us care.

The guy who manages this best is Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr. While the film washes away most of his angularities,Hardy also lends him a tenderness that logically makes him the hinge on which a crucial door rests.

While Firth is almost too logical a choice for Bill Haydon and doesn’t get much to do,Toby Jones is perhaps too lazy a choice to play the eager-to-excel but inept Percy Alleline. Mark Strong,on the other hand,disappoints as the gentle-hearted but angry Jim Prideaux.

Oldman as Smiley swings in his performance,sometimes startling with the fierce determination driving him on (watch out for the scene where he recounts his encounter with the mysterious Soviet intelligence officer Karla in a Delhi jail) and at other times,falling back on just his stooped gait and large glasses to do the talking.

It isn’t easy telling the story from Smiley’s point of view,especially when he spends most of that time keeping an eye on others. However,what the film manages to do is to distill the loneliness of such an existence,whether it is in returning to an empty house or yearning for old companionships.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com