A complete failure

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2012)

I have seen the TV series of this novel made in 1979 three times and the performance by Alec Guinness as George Smiley was one of the great milestones in the history of television drama. Compared to him, in this sad and failed new film version, the performance as Smiley by Gary Oldman is utterly pathetic. Oldman is so wooden he should really be growing in Kew Gardens. On the rare occasions when he moves or tries to show some expression, it is like watching the twitching of a corpse in its coffin, having been given a slight shock by a portable battery. The only decent performances in the film are by John Hurt and Colin Firth, who simply do not know how to be bad, no matter how hard the director attempts to make them so. Mark Strong as Prideaux does well. Everyone else is lost in a wilderness of incompetent direction. The screenplay is so bad that it could enter the list of Worst Film Scripts of All Time. The film is rambling, incoherent, incomprehensible, mumbled, vague, affected, pompous, stupid, and an offence to the viewer's intelligence. It is as if Donald Duck had been asked to film Shakespeare, so comical is it as a pastiche of a spy film. Was it the intention of Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner to make a comedy on the sly? Is that their game? If so, why was Dawn French not cast as Smiley so we could have some real laughs? Now, that would have been worth it. This film is what my late friend John Trevilian would have called 'wrist-slashingly depressing' (which was one of his salubrious phrases). Of course, what does ooze from this misbegotten film, as it does from any John le Carré story, is the omni-presence of treachery in Britain. Britain over the past century has produced traitors in the way that a stagnant pond breeds mosquitoes. There must have been at least 150 major Soviet agents working for the British Government between 1930 and 1990, most of them in the Foreign Office, though always some in the Home Office. In the TV series, the 'finger code' was prominent, for identifying the mole. This was probably based upon the 'toe code' which appears really to have been used by MI6. When Kim Philby reached the Soviet Union he sent a cryptic message back to England by an individual whom he trusted saying that 'the middle toes of both my feet were black'. I always took this to mean that he was not a genuine defector but a 'plant' sent to find out who the mole was, but from his message it appears that there were two. The film omits the finger code altogether. The only famous traitor I ever met was Sir Anthony Blunt. I spent an uncomfortable hour discussing an art matter with him in his grand office at Portman Square when he was Director of the Courtauld Institute. At that time no one would have dreamt that such a man could be a spy. The instant I set eyes upon him I sensed that I was in the presence of a dangerous killer-reptile. I have never hated anyone so violently at first sight, and he seemed to feel the same way about me. It was as if we had known each other in a former life and hated each other before. He was one of the most arrogant, supercilious, snobbish individuals I ever encountered, and utterly loathsome. He covered himself in a vestment of unctuous politeness which oozed vanity and contempt. The atmosphere in the room congealed into a solid state of mutual hatred. We somehow made it through our meeting, despite the fact that to judge from our eyes, what we really wanted to do was lunge at each other's throats and attempt to kill one another. Fortunately, I have never had this happen with anyone else, as it was most disturbing. The hatred was so intense and so instantaneous between us that I am at a loss to give any normal or rational explanation. Many years later, when he was unmasked, I was at last able to say to myself that he was genuinely a villain, and I had not been imagining it. Security chiefs can also be odd. Long before anyone had ever heard of her, or could conceivably have imagined that she was a spook, I sat beside Stella Rimington at dinner, and she did her best to appear an ordinary person. She was tense, brittle, sharp as a whip, totally on the ball, and intermittently prickly. Strange how little innocent Stella at a harmless dinner party steered the subject of conversation onto what I thought of Soviet penetration of the Foreign Office. Such an innocent, in a simple frock! I once saw Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller interviewed on the television news. I thought she came across as an idiot. Let's hope it was just bad 'presentational skills' and not congenital idiocy. Perhaps this all goes to show that security bosses slightly resemble human beings, in that they too can range from the brilliant to the terminally foolish (with all the disastrous consequences that the latter implies). Surely the worst security boss the West has ever known was Allen Dulles, and that was not because he was a fool, but for the opposite reason, that he was too clever, and thought controlling the CIA was not good enough for him, so why not the world instead. The depiction of security bosses in this pathetic film may indeed be its one merit, for if this serves to inform the public that some of the weirdest people in the world are in charge of all our destinies, and that many of them appear to have been dragged foaming at the mouth from an insane asylum in order to preside over assassinations, 'the war of terror', renditions, torture, and the humiliation of airline passengers, then congratulations!