Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

During the title sequence in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the camera descries an elderly man morosely brooding upon an abstract painting. The painting, which someone later calls “an awful daub,” is a gloomy affair, dark brown and grey boxes all intersecting. The camera centers on the painting and the title says Directed by Tomas Alfredson – it’s pretty clear that the grim, dim, unassuming little canvas is a synecdoche for the film itself, also a grim, darkly lit, grayish colored picture in which characters are constrained by box-like frames or murky foreground caging. The picture is incredibly well-acted and, certainly, completely compelling, if, just a tiny bit, monotonous. When someone swears in this picture, or even shows a glimmer of a smile, the whole thing lights up, but just momentarily before plunging back into the sempiternal gloom. Gary Oldman plays Smiley, a burnt-out spy. It’s a minimalist performance; Smiley is not smiley, of course, and shows no emotions other than a certain muted sorrow tempered with a highly observant intelligence. But the minimalism pays off – in the scenes where Smiley seizes control and bullies his craven superiors; the character’s flash of indomitable strength and perseverance overshadows everything else in the picture. With one exception: Colin Firth is indelible as an arrogant senior spy. In a final sequence that flashes back to a fatal Christmas party, Firth manages to portray lethal arrogance, sexual swagger, and a predatory grace in a single ten second shot – this is something that great British actors can accomplish: establish an entire mood – and, indeed, an unexpected mood that changes the whole tone of the film – simply by the way that they walk and hold their shoulders. The movie is mostly close-ups and, almost all the actors, are shot in ways that is grossly unflattering to them: Alfredson is an apostle of the great Carl Dreyer who used his camera like an instrument of torture in films like The Passion of Joan of Arc – Alfredson’s actors and actresses are lit hideously and shot from so close that we can count their sweaty pores. Most of the film simply consists of people observing one another –“spying” – with the greatest intensity. Toward the end of the film there’s another episode that seems emblematic: characters meet outdoors but Alfredson shoots them with a telephoto lens and drops a plane ominously behind them. The telephoto lens is so powerful that the plane seems to fall straight down out of the sky, as if on a mural ten feet behind the actors’ shoulders. The effect is of extreme compression: the outdoors is shot like the inside of prison cell. And the film’s narrative is similarly radically compressed. Every scene does double and triple duty with respect to establishing narrative points and, it must be confessed, that the plot is almost impossible to follow. It makes sense from episode to episode but, over all, you have no concept where you’ve been or where the story is going. In the end of the film, Smiley, once dethroned, is restored to his monarchy over the kingdom of the spooks – but it’s an anticlimax. The entire film has brilliantly, if obsessively, shown that spying is a completely futile, destructive, and vicious business. So what is the triumph in being re-appointed the king of this ghost-empire? With some reservations, this is an excellent picture.