Spying in slow motion

Rating: 5/10 (26 February 2012)

This movie is set in 1973, but it seems rooted in the Sixties, like a nostalgic period piece about the gold times of Cold War. Photography is bleak and "dusty". Not a single bright, saturated colour in sight. Equally bleak are the main characters.
The byzantine plot revolves around finding a mole nested at the top of the British Secret Service – code-named the Circus. The mole is very good at covering his tracks, since he receives first hand info from Karla - the elusive head of Soviet intelligence - every time a communist agent decides to escape to the West to spill the beans.
The Circus is composed by a bunch of middle-aged, unglamorous spies, who look more like average civil servants than like James Bond. Besides, they all are busy keeping up the appearances while living a life of deception, being it about their sexual preferences, drinking or actually working for the Russians. They all have some little dirty secret.
Even Smiley, our agent in the Circus. He is middle aged, silent, not aging gracefully and his wife is sleeping around. After having been forced into retirement by a devious scheme, Smiley is put back in the game to work independently from the Circus.
Enters Ricky Tarr, an agent allegedly gone rogue in Istanbul who is actually the key to finding the mole. Tarr is the only sympathetic character in the whole plot and the only one who is not a failure – yet – at living a meaningful life.
He is also the only one who speaks at normal speed. Somebody must have heard me complaining about how tiresome it can be to follow fast, long conversations. Here we have the total opposite. Dialogues are next to non-existent.
Smileys could easily have found himself at home in the silent movies, as he speaks perhaps four lines of dialogues in the whole movie, except for a long and boring monologue about his meeting with Karla.
Unfortunately, lack of compelling dialogue and the slow pace undermine what classic spy movies are about. No suspense is built in any scene, or curiosity about who the mole might be. When the mole is discovered, the anti-climax is complete.
Even if "Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy" may be very realistic about the life of spies during the cold war, the cinematic results are quite disappointing. Not a bad movie, but brace yourself for interminable pauses, unexplained scenes and non-stop zigzagging in the temporal line.