The casting left me dead cold.

Rating: 6/10 (11 January 2013)

When a well-known novel is brought to the screen, a large part of the audience is bound to be made up of people who've enjoyed the book. For that reason, if not for artistic integrity, I think it's important to try to recreate the original characters as close to their book descriptions as possible. The casting in this film left me dead cold; none of the characters seemed at all right.
Much as I admire Gary Oldman — an actor capable of brilliance in a wide variety of roles — I felt he wasn't able to do justice to the role of George Smiley. It's impossible not to compare this film unfavorably with the 1979 BBC miniseries starring Alec Guinness, whose bland self-effacing — almost bumbling — Smiley defined the role for all time. Oldman projects far too much presence for Smiley & just doesn't seem able to damp it down. The renegade Ricky Tarr comes off way too contrite & nowhere near rebellious enough; David Dencik is another actor who comes on too strong for his assigned role as perennial pleaser Toby Esterhaze, Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke) was neither blowzy nor bumptious enough; & the very idea of a short plump Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham) is ludicrous to anyone who knows & loves the original John Le Carré novels. The only casting that really hit the mark was John Hurt, who captured Control perfectly.
The fault here lies squarely with the casting rather than with the actors, who did the best they could in ill-suited roles. Having read & reread the novel as well as having watched the BBC miniseries, it's hard for me to judge how clearly this film gets the story across, but I suspect quite a few moviegoers walked out of the theater scratching their heads.
Big books need more space. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, for example, was turned into a brilliant 6-hour miniseries. Nothing less could have done it justice. The original BBC version of Tinker Tailor was done the same way for the same reason. I'd like to see a lot more such miniseries; I'm still waiting for someone to do justice to "Jeremiah" Johnson that way.