Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson) [128 points/13 votes]
"Tomas Alfredson's feature-film version of John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is fascinating not just for the intricate tale of espionage, loyalties and betrayal it tells but for the way it is visualized. The first time I saw it, I wasn't sure I could explain the plot (I rarely can), but I was mesmerized the whole time. Structurally and compositionally, it's spellbinding, drawing the viewer into a world of covert emotional and existential compartmentalization (all those shots of people watching fragments of others' lives, their views partially obscured through frames, windows, doors and, sometimes, their own reflections) and universal physical and moral decay (1974 London and Paris look just as grey-brown and decrepit as the crumbling Old World structures of Budapest and Istanbul).
How perplexing, then, that the Academy chose to honor the fussy, digitized images of Hugo (a movie with a palette limited to the colors found in a bowl of peanut M&Ms) over the astonishingly rich cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema. (The Oscar voters quite rightly saw fit to nominate Tinker Tailor for actor [Gary Oldman], screenplay and music, while the BAFTA balloters honored it with nominations in virtually every category.)
It's a movie that sneaks up on you -- and the camera makes a habit of sneaking up behind its characters so that we are looking over their shoulders, seeing what they're seeing, but often unable to read their reactions. The cast is extraordinary, starting with Oldman as George Smiley, an almost invisible man and consummate spy whose face rarely betrays more than a hint of what he's thinking or feeling. But watch closely. Something's always going on there.
Let co-screenwriter Peter Straughan have the last word:
Working with Tomas [Alfredson] was a little like working on a project with a mad professor. Instead of the usual studio notes on "characters arcs," "three-act structure," and "dramatic stakes," Tomas would begin a script meeting by wondering what kind of fairy story "Tinker Tailor" would be; the good Prince who is thrown out of the castle and must defeat the usurper King, we decided. Another meeting began with Tomas arriving with a chess set he had just bought. Which character was which piece, he wondered? We spent the afternoon playing with that idea -- and the chess pieces made it into the script. Other notes included his telling the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema that the film should look like the smell of wet tweed. (He told me that world should have the color of an old man's foreskin. I haven't actually seen an old man's foreskin, but I took the point.) [...]
The adaptation process differs from book to book, but in the case of "Tinker Tailor," it involved a kind of mosaic work. The structure of the novel was broken into pieces. Some long sequences would remain intact -- Peter Guillam stealing the files from the Circus, for example -- but in other cases we would take a line or event from one place in the narrative and move it elsewhere, shifting the fragments around endlessly until it felt right. The goal was to create a new version of the narrative which would bear a close family resemblance to the source material, but have its own cinematic personality. The really difficult part was not fitting the plot into two hours but doing it without losing the tone; to give the film the same autumnal, melancholy pace, and to give the script air and silence.
As the drafts progressed it became evident where new sequences, scenes and images would have to be injected. Bridget, who was endlessly inventive, came up with many of these ideas -- from Guillam's homosexuality to the new café scene at the opening to the simple but eloquent image of Smiley swimming in the ponds at Hampstead Heath, looking at the trembling elderly bodies around him and wondering if this was his world now.
Beautifully said, and beautifully done." - Jim Emerson
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