Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Off to the splendid Curzon Cinema in Chelsea yesterday for the midday showing of the new Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I confess, dear readers, that I approached the film with trepidation. Although a die-hard fan of John le Carré, I have George Smiley et al. fixed forever in my consciousness by the 1979 television adaptation starring Sir Alec Guinness. Nor can I be alone in this; it was bold to produce a new version when the original is so beloved and so rightly celebrated.

However, the film had to be given a chance. A two-hour film and a seven-part television adaptation are different things, and, after all, was not le Carré one of the executive producers of the new film? Tomas Alfredson is a much-lauded director (though I have not seen any of his work).

Reader, I liked it. Despite my scepticism, I managed to set aside preconceived notions and treat the film as something new, and I thought it was good. One of the most striking features is the beautiful appearance of the film; the cinematography is superb, and its evocation of London in the mid-1970s is breathtaking. Like the TV series, it captures the dreariness and drudge of Britain at one of its lowest ebbs, and the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service - "the Circus", as le Carré dubbed it - is a study in beiges and browns, and humdrum bureaucracy.

One of the most scrutinised aspects of the film has been the casting. I was unconvinced by the casting of Gary Oldman as Smiley, and, while he was not as bad as I feared, he still remained somehow wrong. In his attempt to capture the stillness, the banality, the calm of Smiley, he ended up more or less impersonating Alec Guinness, down to the timbre of the voice. I read somewhere that Oldman has "buried" the Guinness version of Smiley; I rather think not.

Many other casting decisions proved to be inspired. John Hurt as Control was superb, an old man seeing things slip from his grasp and desperately trying to stay on top. The frantic chain-smoking and the rages at colleagues were pitch-perfect. Mark Strong was excellent as the betrayed and abandoned Jim Prideaux, a once-great agent left broken by the disastrous expedition to Hungary. And, although not everyone agreed with me, I thought Colin Firth made an outstanding Bill Haydon. Calm and iconoclastic, he conveyed a twinkle of naughtiness that makes Haydon the dangerous rake le Carré created. Benedict Cumberbatch was a very fine Peter Guillam, though the brief scene revealing his homosexuality was puzzlingly pointless.

There were some false notes. The estimable Toby Young was hopelessly miscast as Percy Alleline, the pompous and self-interested successor to Control as head of the Circus. Simon McBurney's Lacon was a strange, subservient, oleaginous figure, and Kathy Burke (whom I confess I do not like) as Connie Sachs was, well, no Beryl Reid. The scenes with Connie and Smiley, so affecting in the television series, were flat and unconvincing with Oldman and Burke in position.

Perhaps the revelation was Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr. It was a performance of such guile and nuance that the inevitable comparison with 1979, when Hywel Bennett took the role, left Bennett looking weaker than he did at the time. Tarr's motivation and character were so much more convincing, as was the terrible self-delusion of his condemnation of the way the other spies live their lives.

There were some weaknesses in the plotting, too. The unmasking of the mole (sadly not referred to as Gerald in the new film) left you wondering how Smiley had come to the conclusion he did. Nor was Firth given the material to explain his betrayal, with the result that the end of the film was rather flat. That said, there was a satisfying conclusion when Smiley returns to the Circus and takes Control's chair in the meeting room.

All in all, the film does le Carré (who appears fleetingly in a party scene) credit. It's fine adaptation of a brilliant novel. Could it have been better? Yes. But it could have been an awful lot worse.