Sometimes You Need A Scorecard.

Rating: 7/10 (24 August 2013)

I'm giving this production some bonus points for the elegant photography, composition, acting, and the use of sound. Oh, and for being a movie that should be X rated because in all these respects it's a movie made for adults rather than ten-year olds. There's very little violence. Nobody's head is removed with a hedge trimmer. There are a few shootings but never once do we see the shooter and victim in the same frame. The camera doesn't wobble as if held by a drunk and the pallet, though muted, is not drawn from the cadaverous green area. Felicitations.
The story is basically simple. The never-smiling, extremely cool, Gary Oldman is George Smiley, part of some high-up British intelligence agency. It's 1973 and there is a Moscow Mule somewhere in the department. Smiley and one or two help mates finally dig him out. The biggest rat of all gets away -- I think.
However, the screenplay meanders all over the place, with mostly passionless subplots that turn the film into a Cretan labyrinth with no Minotaur, just the labyrinth. You need patience to get through this; and a mature sensibility, not one attuned to instant and complete gratification.
The two most tragic scenes.
(1) Tom Hardy is a young British spy in Budapest who falls for the young woman he's squeezing secret information out of. Hardy himself is handsome, I suppose. He looks like Kevin Costner with Marlon Brando lips. But his girl friend, Svetlana Khodchenkova, is an absolute knockout with her blue tartar eyes. I wish the USSR had collapsed earlier than it did so we could have gotten to know her better, although, come to think of it, she was only seven or eight when the implosion took place. Anyway, she winds up with a bullet through her head. That's tragic.
(2) One of the subplots involves an ex British spy, tortured by the Reds, now a stern teacher in a boy's boarding school. At first arid and unforgiving in class, he forms a friendship with a chubby little kid who is an outsider at the school too. But the teacher is drawn back into "the circus" and towards the end, when the plain little social isolate tries to give him a present, the teacher curses and shoos him away, knowing that his peaceful, pastoral existence must come to an end. All of us murderers who work for the state must know how the school teacher feels.
The cast is fine. I was happy to see the craggy face of John Hurt as "Control." He gave me such splendid support in the classic "From The Hip." I liked him too because he was shorter than I. The rest of the cast is equally good.
Except for what I take to be the Etonian haircut, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley's reliable, homosexual assistant, reminds me of Kenneth Williams from the "Carry On" series. Incidentally, the brief scene in which Cumberbatch's homosexuality is revealed, there is only one line of dialog that trips the viewer to what's happening: "If there's someone else --" Otherwise, as so often elsewhere, you might not know what the hell is going on.