Watch the TV series instead

Rating: 1/10 (31 December 2011)

I really wanted to enjoy this film. I watch the 1979 TV series at least once a year and was looking forward to a new, dark, edgy take on a well-loved story.
I was very disappointed. First, the plot is mashed up (for example Ricki Tarr, who should set Smiley's mole hunt in motion, does not appear until the half-way point). Secondly, characters are not developed and even altered (Percy Alleline is a peevish bully, rather than an over-promoted pompous buffoon who has been suckered into giving the KGB a pipeline into Western intelligence, and Peter Guillam is fashionably gay). We don't even get any sense of Bill Haydon's motivation to turn double agent apart from a throwaway line about the West being "rather horrible". Colin Firth does make more of Haydon's frustration at working for an increasingly impotent power - Britain - when he wants to make a mark on History and therefore turns to a more dynamic force which he believes the USSR to be.
There is no suspense in the key scenes where Peter Guillam steals a top secret file from the archives, or even in the revelation of the mole. What Hitchcock could have done with these sequences! One scene which did work for me on a symbolic level was the Christmas party. This is original to the film but does suggest how the British intelligence service (and, by implication, Britain itself) has become lazy and hedonistic, and is losing its grip.
Gary Oldman totally fails to capture George Smiley's self-deprecating intelligence. We get no indication of Smiley piecing together a jigsaw and realising what the 'Witchcraft' project really means. Film-makers often confuse British reserve with unemotional stolidity, and Oldman walks straight into that trap.
The cinematography looks good, with shadowy interiors suggesting the claustrophobia of the world of espionage, but the design for the Circus HQ is all wrong - it is not a huge open-plan office, but a series of small, seedy little rooms.
All in all this was a huge disappointment. I came straight home from the cinema and put the BBC series back into my DVD player.