I Want To Talk About Loyalty

Rating: 6/10 (6 October 2011)

Someone at the top of the British Secret Service is a mole, passing information to the Kremlin. George Smiley is tasked by the Foreign Office with unmasking them.
For my money, there are two great (and very contrasting) spies in British literature - Ian Fleming's James Bond and John Le Carré's George Smiley, who is the antithesis of Bond; quiet, unassuming, brilliant, a player of pawns on the international stage. Oldman is just terrific here, one of those mesmerising performances where everything the character feels is in his eyes - he never even has to raise his voice. The support cast is good, with Strong and Cumberbatch both intriguing as Prideaux the captured agent, and Guillam, the young protégé, respectively. The movie is set in 1973 and the attention to detail is excellent with all the right cars and clothes, but more importantly the style - Alfredson's film could just as easily have been made in 1973 and will be just as taut and edgy forty years from now. This is a movie about paranoia and political manoeuvring in a male-dominated world and Smiley is the puppet-master who refuses to lose his cool no matter what the situation, as in the scene where he matter-of-factly accuses the minister of being indirectly responsible for the security leaks or the moment at the Christmas party where he discovers his wife is having an affair. This is a man who doesn't even take his glasses off whilst swimming. There are dozens of brilliant little touches, like the fly in the car scene or the moment of epiphany just as the train points click home, which add enormously to a rich and thought-provoking film. There is also a memorably understated piano score by Spanish composer Alberto Iglesias which drifts around the scenes with quiet intensity. Smiley's history is a little complex; he's a minor character in Le Carré's early books Call For The Dead and The Spy Who Came In From The Cold then the main protagonist in this, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, but also appears on the periphery in a few other works. This book was filmed previously as an excellent 1979 BBC TV serial with Alec Guinness as Smiley, which is well worth catching if you can. This movie version however is a great old-fashioned thriller and a smashing adaptation of a tremendous spy novel.