Over-rated and dismal

Rating: 3/10 (15 April 2016)

I am surprised that this film was so well received by the critics. I hated it. It is over-stylised and over-designed, the story is fractured and hard to follow, much of the dialogue is reduced to one-line fragments, gloomy music seeps out of the sound track like rising damp, and we see so little of the four principal suspects that it is very hard to care who turns out to be the traitor.
It is done as a period piece set in the 1970s, when the novel was written, but I was around in the 1970s and I never saw an office anything like the Circus as portrayed here, still less a London hotel like the one where George Smiley stays to carry out his investigation. It may be that the film makers were trying to create an atmosphere of nightmare, but this is to misrepresent Le Carré: he may be pessimistic, but he is not Kafka.
Gary Oldman was an unexpected choice to play George Smiley as we are used to seeing him in much more flamboyant roles, and I didn't find him convincing. I thought he took Smiley's inscrutable reserve to the verge of caricature, as well as being too young for the part. The other actors were largely wasted even when not miscast.
The only scene I enjoyed was the Christmas party where the boozed-up staff of the British Secret Service join in a hearty rendering of the Soviet national anthem, led by a man in a Lenin mask and a Santa suit. John le Carré appears as an extra in this scene as well as being credited as co-producer, so he implicitly endorsed the film, but I find it hard to believe that he was satisfied with the finished product.