Very well done, lovingly crafted. Great Cold War spy film

Rating: 8/10 (27 May 2012)

Great movie. It is slow, the action is very subtle, and the plot is complicated. However, for those of us who lived through the Cold War, reading spy novels, and wondering if WW3 was right around the corner, this masterful film is a well-spent visit down memory lane. This is a snapshot of a time in history when tensions ran high on each side of the "Iron Curtain", a time period that lasted for decades and nearly disappeared over night. It had become a way of life, a time which many today never experienced and the rest of us often forget ever happened.
The lighting? For the mood and for the time, is spot on. The slow moving plot? Well, this is exactly how the Cold War would play out. Moles, conspiracies, and covert operations were often years or even decades in the making. Until the Reagan/Thatcher era came along, this is exactly how the Cold War played out; it was not like a James Bond movie. To back up this claim of realism, I offer this information from Wikipedia: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is John le Carré's novelisation of his experiences of the revelations in the 1950s and the 1960s which exposed the Cambridge Five traitors, among them Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross and Kim Philby, as KGB moles employed by the SIS. Karla is modelled after KGB Gen. Rem Krassilnikov, whose obituary in the New York Times newspaper reported that the CIA considered him as such. Moreover, skewing in favour of the latter, Smiley reports that Karla was trained by "Berg," Alexander Mikhailovich Orlov, an NKVD intelligence officer who defected to the West in 1938. The character Bill Haydon is derived from Kim Philby, who, in the late 1950s, transcended SIS suspicions that he too might be a traitor, given his connection with the defector Guy Burgess, and continued as an SIS intelligence officer until defecting to the USSR in 1963. David Cornwell (John le Carré) worked as an intelligence officer for the SIS (MI6) during Philby's tenure, and has said that Philby betrayed his identity to the Russians, which was a factor in the 1964 termination of his intelligence career. Connie Sachs, the Circus's principal Russia researcher, is modelled upon Milicent Bagot." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker,_Tailor,_Soldier,_Spy)
If you are up for a slow, subtle, and artfully presented trip into our not-too-distant past, this is as good as it gets. The plot is complex with many players who may have straddled each side of the fence at one point. Oldman is masterful. If you follow him, his character will lead you through all the smoke and mirrors until you are able to wrap your head around the plot. Great movie if you are one to handle the pace.