"How do I bore you? --Let me count the ways."

Rating: 1/10 (17 January 2012)

I warmly recommend this movie to those for whom the distillation of ennui is an acquired tasted and a cherished pastime as it gives a whole new meaning to the word "Boredom".
As for me, it left me baffled, very frustrated and, worse, ill at ease. I've seen late afternoon professional training programs more exciting than that! I caught myself looking at my watch, which I usually never do at the movies. In the end I no longer cared.
I am quite familiar with the type of narrative technique. Tidbits of information are interspersed with flashbacks and silences, lots of long silences meant to be weighted with meaning or import it seems; the components of the puzzle at long last congealing together like a mosaic whose full effect is programmed to appear in the last 15 or 10 minutes of the movie. Nothing new. But here, this technique is so obsessively systematic as to become ponderous, tiresome, then boring and finally utterly demobilizing. The bits and pieces felt unrelated or poorly connected, but knowing that the solution would be revealed in the end, I just waited for it.
For two hours I waited and waited, and waited it out.
Meanwhile there was nothing engaging, involving, motivating, moving, touching, much less memorable or thrilling to alleviate the monotony of the unfolding process. It was no longer entertainment nor fiction but a process, a spy movie being deconstructed on the screen.
Not the slightest emotional connection with the characters was possible. Neither likable nor hateful, they were just plain, gray, drab civil servants going to the office, a collection of perfect strangers' snapshots.
The characters' personalities remained so shrunken, so sketchy, so abstract, so devoid of humanity, so disconnected from any appearance of life, so completely lacking any existence outside their place of work that I could never get to care about what was happening to them in the present nor in the end. After leaving the movie theater, someone told me that they were under the impression that Smiley was married, yet throughout the movie I took it that he was single. Anyway, how such a cold fish as he could have ever known what love is? Or would marriage have been a professional move, part of his cover? This man's only life was to go to the office, sit at a desk, shuffle papers, ask bland questions, have a drink after hours in a depressing looking house: gee, how exciting for the viewer!
Empathy for the eventually victimized characters was impossible since they always remained complete strangers to one. The very violent demises left one rather detached: they came across as staged, badly staged sometimes: merely happening through actors enacting them for a movie. I felt I was watching a construct, an artificial creation, a castle of leaden Lego blocks haphazardly being put together. Never a minute was it possible to suspend disbelief; trying to understand turned into a penance. Watching Tinker, Tailor, etc, felt like atonement for having had too much pleasure with other movies such as The Descendants.
This huge endeavor of a movie comes undone like a bad crosswords puzzle; it collapses under the crushing weight of its narrative technique and mystifying deliberate blandness. The conclusion merely feels like the last dot at the end of a book, leaving one uninvolved. It reminds one of the fabled mountain giving birth to a mouse (I'll skip the facile pun). This lack of drama and emotion might have been the director's point for all I do not know. So that's all it was about: bland people leading bland existences doing abstruse tedious activities at the taxpayer's expenses in a world where it endlessly rains? Nothing else but a lengthy dissertation on boring existences? Probably the traitor betrayed because he couldn't stand the tedium any longer and was dying for some excitement.
Of course there's a moral, and more than one philosophical points; insightful scholarly articles with lots of footnotes will probably be written about them. If there was fodder aplenty to give academics a field day, there was not much of a story and even less entertainment.
Paradoxically, the acting was very good. Poor poor actors! It was only too obvious they were giving their all trying to extricate and prop up some figments of personality from the morass in which they were obsessively confined! One felt sorry for their talent to have to fight against such unrewarding material and direction. A great pity for the actors, between two yawns, was the only emotion this movie elicited.
This story felt like a very old, very worn tale exhumed out of the wet ashes of a sordid and irrelevant past in which it ought to have been left buried and forgotten. Too much Tinkering made an excellent cure for insomnia.