Riveting but ultimately confusing

Rating: 7/10 (7 October 2007)

I literally sat on the edge of my seat watching this film, and it's oft criticised length did not bother me at all, in fact I would have preferred it to be longer in order to tie up some of the loose ends which were not made clear.
First, the good parts. The supporting cast, other than noted, was superb. Michael Gambon especially who seemed to have stepped right out of Cambridge Spies. Was he or wasn't he a double agent? There is always a question hanging over the people involved in this line of work. Wilson's Russian counterpart, Ulysses, was the other side of the same coin. The film did show very well that intelligence agents are interchangeable between their countries, especially if they lose faith in their government. The film indirectly questioned whether it was the right choice to recruit agents from the upper class elite, just as Britain did and later found to its cost that privileged backgrounds are no guarantee of loyalty.
The lack of fisticuffs, car chases, and James Bond style circus tricks was a relief. Intellience gathering is deadly monotony with a lot of watching and waiting.
My main problem, other than that I found the storyline somewhat confusing, was the casting of Angeline Jolie as the long suffering wife. First of all, Ms. Jolie is one of those actors who are so well known and larger than life, via the gossip columns, that they cannot submerge themselves into the character. While the rest of the players become their characters, the Angeline Jolies of Hollywood remain themselves and consequently strike a wrong note. the viewer is watching Angelina Jolie, not Clover. In addition, her character, Clover, began as a sexually aggressive man hunter from an upper class WASP background, then turned into a neglected wife patiently waiting for her husband to come home from the war, and post war, and beyond. Ms. Jolie did not convince me that she would put up with that. I was waiting throughout the film for her to dump Wilson. He was away for six years! Was there never any leave?
The switching from period to period was also a little confusing, but much less forgivable was not clearing up the loose ends, or was the fate of the son and his fiancé meant to be ambiguous? We know what happened to her, but who did it? Why did they take the Russian defector at face value and not ask him to play the violin when he first was briefed, why did they wait until much later? The DVD showed deleted scenes, and in one of them they asked the defector to play the violin in what may have been an earlier scene, but unfortunately there was no commentary supplied revealing why the scenes had been deleted, especially the fate of Clover's brother John, whose troubling fate was just written off. This was a thoroughly engrossing film, but I could have used a director's commentary on the DVD.