In a 1970s cold war spy story, very nicely done but very difficult to follow.

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2012)

My wife and I saw this on DVD. We enjoyed it, the whole movie is interesting and filled with established actors in most roles. But when it was over we wondered if we were the only two who had a hard time following everything.
So I first went to old reliable (for me), the critic Ebert. He wrote almost exactly what we had been thinking, he couldn't follow it either, even though he has made a career of following sometimes complex movies and making sense of them.
So next I read a number of user reviews here, as well as many of the discussion items, and guess what? The most common theme is how difficult it is to follow all the characters and to understand what was going on. So I give this movie a favorable rating, I enjoyed it very much, but frankly it is very hard to follow. And when it was all over, I knew who the spy was, but I can't really say what all I saw in the movie.
Gary Oldman plays what turns out to be the central character, George Smiley . There had been an incident, Smiley was fired from the British secret agency, but now the old chairman of the group has approached him. They strongly suspect that there is a mole, a traitor in the organization and that it is one of the top five members. Smiley is asked to come back to investigate and figure it all out. Which he eventually does.
The movie's title comes from a code system used during the investigation and required communications. Each man being investigated was given a code name ... Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, etc ... and one of them would turn out to be the spy! Some action, but mostly quiet and often incomplete conversations which ended in vague, indirect references or implications. Enjoyable movie but very hard to follow. Maybe I already said that?