The thinking man's Bond

Rating: 9/10 (23 March 2012)

Welcome to the Circus! There are no acrobats here, no clowns, no happy children. Just a bunch of dreary and boring bureaucrats juggling nothing less than the fate of the earth. It probably takes a film like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to understand how much our view of the world – and the work – of intelligence services has been contaminated by the glamorous universe of James Bond or his modern, more disillusioned but even more heroic, counterpart Jason Bourne. So we've come to expect a world of action and heroism, of right versus wrong, of shady backroom dealings and deadly plots which are opposed by a few brave and righteous men. The are backrooms and intrigue, there is plenty of violence and a few righteous men here, too. But there is no glamour, no heroism, no glory. This is not a game, this is dead serious and reminds us how, just a few years ago – and in many ways still today – this was where the frontline ran in a relentless though largely invisible war, a war fought in the place of a "real" one which nobody wanted to fight because it could not be won. This was never about heroics, this was all about survival.
Director Tomas Alfredson creates – or recreates – a world paralysed by fear, a world which might explode at any moment, in which laughable chess players clumsily try to avoid what seems inevitable. The film takes place in the 1960s, at a time when common sense had it that this earth was doomed, that there would be a nuclear war which would extinguish the world we have come to know. This pale, grey, claustrophobic world seems already dead, almost devoid of color, covered in a sickly greenish grey that has sucked all life from it.
This world's James Bond is called George Smiley, but smile he hardly ever does. He is a grey-haired, stone-faced middle-aged man whose life is over, having lost his top job at MI6 as well as his wife. He is yesterday's man, a relic from a time in which integrity counted for something. Now it is all a game, a struggle for power in which the frontlines are hardly visible and ever shifting. Gary Oldman is Smiley and he gives one of the most memorable performances of his career. There is hardly any discernible movement in his stern face, reading it is like reading between lines and yet all the film happens right there, in those minuscule movements, the slight clouding and unclouding of those unforgiving features. A hard man in hard times for which he is much better equipped than the arrogant narcissists which regard themselves as modern.
Smiley was forcefully retired but is brought back to lead a secret operation aimed at discovering a mole at the highest level of the "Circus". Instead of embarking on an action-filled hunt, Smiley hides in a seedy hotel room, studying mountains of documents. This is a bureaucrats' war and it can only be won by a master bureaucrat. And it is won by talking, investigating, thinking, drawing conclusions – and, most importantly, by listening and observing. There is very little movement in this film which mostly takes place in narrow, suffocating rooms, whether it is Smiley's dusty makeshift headquarters, the dreary grey corridors of the "Circus" or the antiseptic chilliness of the board room. The film opens with an operation going horribly wrong in Budapest but this war is fought in backrooms. So it is fitting that it's final, completely nonviolent and mostly silent showdown takes place in a dark empty house.
This is the ultimate Anti-Bond: serious, honest, unglamorous, unheroic. For this war is very real and it is not glamorous at all. The methods employed by the two sides are the same and vary only in their level of professionalism. But there is more: Incredulously, Smiley tells the story of once meeting the Soviet Union's top spy who chose to return home expecting to be executing in Stalin's reign of terror rather than defect to the West. Smiley cannot understand this ideological fanaticism which he regards as the Russian's only weakness. He is a pragmatist, for him it is not about ideology but sheer survival. There is no room for grand ideas when you're balancing the edge of an abyss. It takes no hero not to fall, it takes a bureaucrat.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a masterpiece of a spy thriller, full of suspense in which the violence is always dirty, never heroic or glorified. It is a claustrophobic, bloodless world it depicts which has no place for heroism, a world in which no games are played and where right and wrong are no moral categories, although it does not deny the value of decency. The political field on which these shadow armies move is no colorful background, it is deadly reality. In the very end, there is a slight smile on Smiley's face, a brief sign of triumph which cannot hide the fact that nothing is over because it never is. Time to go to work.