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kiev4am(I've been trying to finish this stupid review-effort-thing for two weeks. I don't know why, but I seem to fail the hell out of writing at the moment).
This is a hard film to write up impartially. I'm such a huge fan of John Le Carré's Smiley novels and of the Alec Guinness BBC adaptation (both deeply imprinted at a far-too-impressionable age) that any film version that kept halfway the right tone was always going to shortcut my critical faculties. This film did far more than keep the tone. It was a thoughtful director's love letter to the fallen Le Carré world of espionage: to rundown offices, murky lifts and dogeared files, to muffled good intentions, bureaucracy and self-deceit; to the background decay of secret empires and to old spies in a hurry. Needless to say, I loved it.
It starts slowly, as it should. Although I knew the sort of pace the film should have if it was faithful to the book, and was absolutely not looking for it to be given a cheap shot of Bourne-speed, I have to wonder what fans of modern spy films who were unfamiliar with the novel made of the film's opening half hour - the cramped, deskbound exposition, the bad suits, the absence of choppy jump-cuts or fight choreography, most of all the stubbornly uncinematic age and stillness of our lead spy, George Smiley, played with perfect silvery caution by Gary Oldman. (There's a delightful little shout-out at the start when Smiley gets some new glasses which just happen to be identical to those worn by Alec Guinness' version. They're functional, too, since the glasses-change helps show when we're in flashback.) The pace quickens by slow degrees, tightening like a fist until you can't think of leaving your seat, tension ratcheted by sidelong glances, furtive hands, ringing telephones and rifled papers. The flashes of violence are genuinely shocking, all the more stark for their rarity. There are a couple of 'filmed up' segments (the interrogation of Esterhase, the final confrontation of Haydon and Prideaux) but I found it hard to be a purist about it when the overall effect was so satisfyingly downbeat.
What a cast, too. Like the BBC series it's a showcase of beautiful and gnarly masculine acting talent: Mark Strong's driven, craggy Jim Prideaux; Tom Hardy's loose-cannon charmer Ricki Tarr; Benedict Cumberbatch's twitchy, dapper Peter Guillam; actor-director Simon McBurney as smooth politico Lacon, Colin Firth playing shiftily against type as Haydon, and a wonderfully irascible John Hurt as Control; and at the centre of it all, watching and listening and digging and very occasionally showing his claws, is Gary Oldman's phenomenal Smiley. He's neater and more wiry than Le Carré's descriptions, with less of the deceptive affability that Alec Guinness brought to the role, but at first (especially with those glasses) I felt I was watching a polished, dedicated homage to Guinness' performance. The watchful eyes, the heavy pauses, the carefully maintained old man's habits; there is a way that Smiley needs to be played, and by getting it right Oldman had to walk a distance in his predecessor's shoes. And it's tremendously watchable. But there's a scene in the film - a drunken monologue on Karla, his Soviet nemesis - that's so riveting and so natural that, by the end of it, it's hard to remember a different Smiley than Oldman. It's partly his expert judgement of the right degree of drunkenness - the owlish determination, the slight sway and catch as he stands up - and partly the sheer magnetism of the delivery, the wholeness of voice and body language capturing the ferocity of Smiley's memory and his inability to live with it. It's a fantastic, defining moment in a performance that's already assured.
There were a couple of missteps, for me. Connie felt very underwritten compared to the rakish, florid, bloody-minded Connie of the novel, played so perfectly by Beryl Reid in the BBC series. The film makes her a wistful retiree, takes away her bleary rage at the dying of the Circus light and her dogged, waspish brilliance. Since Connie's not just a gloriously vivid character but also the only genuinely present female character in the story - the only woman who doesn't live solely in mens' thoughts and memories - this seems a waste of both an iconic Le Carré creation and of Kathy Burke's fierce acting talents.
The director also pulled the punch of Haydon's capture, dropping Guillam's rage from the scene so that all we're left with is Smiley's glum sense of inevitability. The arrest of Haydon at the safe house was the moment that cemented my feeling of reading not a 'spy thriller' but a great novel, an epic tragedy made all the more truthful by the gloomy Britishness of both the spying details and the spies' moral drift. I think the film's bland reveal was meant to show that it didn't matter who the mole was, what mattered was the fact of his betrayal and its effect - and this is a very Le Carré theme - but I couldn't help feeling cheated of the Shakespearean ending I'd remembered from the book.
But altogether I was way too busy wallowing in the seedy richness of atmosphere and detail, the persuasive Le Carré mood of urban middle-aged secrecy and the gripping conviction of Oldman and company to feel like complaining too much. I really hope the director, Tomas Alfredson, considers making Smiley's People too.
This is a hard film to write up impartially. I'm such a huge fan of John Le Carré's Smiley novels and of the Alec Guinness BBC adaptation (both deeply imprinted at a far-too-impressionable age) that any film version that kept halfway the right tone was always going to shortcut my critical faculties. This film did far more than keep the tone. It was a thoughtful director's love letter to the fallen Le Carré world of espionage: to rundown offices, murky lifts and dogeared files, to muffled good intentions, bureaucracy and self-deceit; to the background decay of secret empires and to old spies in a hurry. Needless to say, I loved it.
It starts slowly, as it should. Although I knew the sort of pace the film should have if it was faithful to the book, and was absolutely not looking for it to be given a cheap shot of Bourne-speed, I have to wonder what fans of modern spy films who were unfamiliar with the novel made of the film's opening half hour - the cramped, deskbound exposition, the bad suits, the absence of choppy jump-cuts or fight choreography, most of all the stubbornly uncinematic age and stillness of our lead spy, George Smiley, played with perfect silvery caution by Gary Oldman. (There's a delightful little shout-out at the start when Smiley gets some new glasses which just happen to be identical to those worn by Alec Guinness' version. They're functional, too, since the glasses-change helps show when we're in flashback.) The pace quickens by slow degrees, tightening like a fist until you can't think of leaving your seat, tension ratcheted by sidelong glances, furtive hands, ringing telephones and rifled papers. The flashes of violence are genuinely shocking, all the more stark for their rarity. There are a couple of 'filmed up' segments (the interrogation of Esterhase, the final confrontation of Haydon and Prideaux) but I found it hard to be a purist about it when the overall effect was so satisfyingly downbeat.
What a cast, too. Like the BBC series it's a showcase of beautiful and gnarly masculine acting talent: Mark Strong's driven, craggy Jim Prideaux; Tom Hardy's loose-cannon charmer Ricki Tarr; Benedict Cumberbatch's twitchy, dapper Peter Guillam; actor-director Simon McBurney as smooth politico Lacon, Colin Firth playing shiftily against type as Haydon, and a wonderfully irascible John Hurt as Control; and at the centre of it all, watching and listening and digging and very occasionally showing his claws, is Gary Oldman's phenomenal Smiley. He's neater and more wiry than Le Carré's descriptions, with less of the deceptive affability that Alec Guinness brought to the role, but at first (especially with those glasses) I felt I was watching a polished, dedicated homage to Guinness' performance. The watchful eyes, the heavy pauses, the carefully maintained old man's habits; there is a way that Smiley needs to be played, and by getting it right Oldman had to walk a distance in his predecessor's shoes. And it's tremendously watchable. But there's a scene in the film - a drunken monologue on Karla, his Soviet nemesis - that's so riveting and so natural that, by the end of it, it's hard to remember a different Smiley than Oldman. It's partly his expert judgement of the right degree of drunkenness - the owlish determination, the slight sway and catch as he stands up - and partly the sheer magnetism of the delivery, the wholeness of voice and body language capturing the ferocity of Smiley's memory and his inability to live with it. It's a fantastic, defining moment in a performance that's already assured.
There were a couple of missteps, for me. Connie felt very underwritten compared to the rakish, florid, bloody-minded Connie of the novel, played so perfectly by Beryl Reid in the BBC series. The film makes her a wistful retiree, takes away her bleary rage at the dying of the Circus light and her dogged, waspish brilliance. Since Connie's not just a gloriously vivid character but also the only genuinely present female character in the story - the only woman who doesn't live solely in mens' thoughts and memories - this seems a waste of both an iconic Le Carré creation and of Kathy Burke's fierce acting talents.
The director also pulled the punch of Haydon's capture, dropping Guillam's rage from the scene so that all we're left with is Smiley's glum sense of inevitability. The arrest of Haydon at the safe house was the moment that cemented my feeling of reading not a 'spy thriller' but a great novel, an epic tragedy made all the more truthful by the gloomy Britishness of both the spying details and the spies' moral drift. I think the film's bland reveal was meant to show that it didn't matter who the mole was, what mattered was the fact of his betrayal and its effect - and this is a very Le Carré theme - but I couldn't help feeling cheated of the Shakespearean ending I'd remembered from the book.
But altogether I was way too busy wallowing in the seedy richness of atmosphere and detail, the persuasive Le Carré mood of urban middle-aged secrecy and the gripping conviction of Oldman and company to feel like complaining too much. I really hope the director, Tomas Alfredson, considers making Smiley's People too.
