Good but not great

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2011)

I came to Tinker Tailor cold - I had not seen the BBC series or read the book. I had read a couple of reviews, mind you, so I knew what a terrific movie it was, they had told me so. And it did have the cream of British acting in it, after all.
I'm not convinced.
Let me say, to start off with, that I'm not going to attempt a synopsis other than to say that there is a mole in the British Secret Service and it falls to George Smiley to find out who it is. There is more plot here than in half a dozen other films and, frankly, I found Inception easier to follow by a wide margin. Nobody can be trusted, anything anyone says might be a lie, and you can't even rely on people being dead (or, when you can, you think you can't because it might not be immediately clear that what you are watching might be a flashback). It is, to say the least, a challenging experience, and I am still not 100% sure that I understood who was on who's side or why..
It is beautifully photographed, in shades of middle class, middle aged, non-swinging 60s urban European winter.
I once did some amateur dramatic acting under the guiding eye of an actor with a long and successful career in character work (which included a Star Wars and a couple of Indiana Jones movies), and he said that actors learn to make the most of their pauses. That is certainly the case here: this is some of the most pause-laden acting ever to grace a mainstream feature. I don't say that this is necessarily a bad thing, but the very... measured... delivery is quite noticeable. There is little sense of urgency.
As for Gary Oldman? I love Gary Oldman's work: he is always a class act, fully committed, even in those of his films which have been least credible (koff Lost In Space, Fifth Element koff). Yet, oddly, in Tinker Tailor - despite the critical plaudits which have landed on him - I never felt that his accent sounded natural. He fully inhabited George Smiley in all other respects, but the accent never rang true for me.
This is, indeed, a good film, but I didn't feel it was as very good as advance word had led me to expect.