Stinker, Staler, Colder & Why

Rating: 2/10 (15 January 2012)

I'm a huge Le Carre fan, but had read mostly his post-Smiley novels. When I heard that Tinker...was being remade I thought it a good time to read the novel first. Familiar with the extraordinary success and reputation of the original Alec Guiness presentation, but having never seen it, I was impressed with the initial reviews given the film. Boy, am I glad I read the book first! The book was incredible, clearly a masterpiece and a paradigm of the genre. The characters were multi-layered and their complexity was in clear contrast to those in other familiar spy novels. However upon seeing the film my disappointment was palpable and profound. Although any film must make compromises due to the limitations of time, here it appeared the director was banking on the belief that the audience had read the book first. In my humble opinion, there was no way one could have have followed the storyline haven't not had some prior knowledge of the book. After reading Ebert's review, it' s clear he also appears to have similar reservation, stating he had his own problems following the narrative ( little wonder considering the lack of scaffolding in the script )of the film. Now I'm not a director or screenwriter, but in a book which draws on innumerable flashbacks, would it not have been advantageous to have more flashbacks with narrative voice-overs ( a device well adapted in the film "Spy Games" ). Instead we're given meaningless looks at the past with no guidance to their significance,in indistinguishable,drab location in order to create a vision or atmosphere the director surmised as artistic. Humbug!!! I also found that despite its preeminent cast, some of Britian's A-listers, they're given little in the way of a script. So we find sketchy,facile characters in lieu of vivid and memorable ones. Take Ciaran Hinds, an extraordinary character actor,whose films include "Munich" and the highly touted HBO series " Rome", in which he brilliantly portrayed the savvy Julius Caesar, he barely speaks a line in the film. Unfortunately, we are given what amounts to smirks or frowns at the camera and we, the audience, are to glean from these facial expressions their individual traits and personalities. In summation, this movie was over-hyped and never really got the essence of the story and the complexity that make it such a timeless treasure. I look forward to seeing the serialized BBC version which must have understood, at the outset, the draw-backs of making this novel into a feature film.