Hugely disappointing

Rating: 4/10 (16 January 2012)

I read "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" some twenty years ago. I don't recall all the details of the book, but I remember it being a beguiling novel (though I think that John Le Carre has written better books, like for instance, its sequel "The Honourable Schoolboy"). The book is basically about taciturn spy George Smiley being brought back from retirement in order to catch a mole set by his Soviet nemesis, Karla, in the Circus (an alter ego for MI6, the British Intelligence Service). Now comes a film version of the novel, that roughly respects the plot (in 1979, there was a miniseries about the book, starring Alec Guiness as Smiley, which I haven't seen). The recreation of the era (the early 1970s) is fine, but this about the only good thing that I can say about this movie.
First, in this movie, Smiley is performed by Gary Oldman, almost unrecognizable under loads of old age makeup (wouldn't it have made more sense to hire an older actor to play Smiley?).
Second, the movie is at times dull and boring and its tone is ridiculously somber.
Third, almost all the actors here perform languidly, as if they were making a parody of a British gentleman. Now, the cast includes many famous British actors (aside Oldman, we have Colin Firth, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and many others that are lesser known). These actors are usually fine performers in other movies, so clearly the filmmakers are at fault here.
Fourth, the movie is virtually impossible to understand if you haven't read the book (understandably so, considering six hours of the miniseries have been compressed to two hours).
Worst of all, the climactic scene when the mole is finally caught (for obvious reasons, I'm not going to say who he is) is, well, totally anticlimactic, to the point where the audience might felt cheated, after all the previous buildup (by the way, it is interesting to see that when the traitor is find, he is initially treated with kids gloves, as if never forgetting that while he might be a Soviet spy, he hasn't stopped being a gentleman. So, in a way, this movie suggests that postwar Britain might have not been very well suited to the ruthless game of international espionage).
So, summing up, a great disappointment, a movie that despite high expectations and high critical acclaim has in my opinion little to recommend for it.