Well-acted, stylish, nice cinematography, but...

Rating: 7/10 (31 August 2013)

I really wanted to like this film more than I did. The actors are among my favorites, the story has always gripped me. And, much of it I do like. It's moodily filmed, generating a strong and believable atmosphere of real-life espionage, and is, as I would expect from the cast, very well acted.
The problem - and it's huge - is that the film makes very little sense unless you are already familiar with the book (or one of the preceding TV or radio adaptations). Even then, it's somewhat frustrating, because, much more so than prior adaptations, the plot has been tweaked, characters omitted or changed, and the dialogue fairly brutally hacked in an attempted to streamline the dense and convoluted plot. It fails to do this convincingly, in the process making the narrative less believable. Its greatest failure is to dilute the tension of the hunt for the mole, largely because none of the suspects are developed on any level as a convincing character despite the best efforts of the cast with the few minutes allotted to them for dialogue. You can argue that this is a fault of the novel too, but le Carré supplies just enough meat for you to get a convincing sense of motive and action. This is missing from the film. It not missing from either the excellent Alec Guinness TV adaptation or the equally fine Simon Russell Beale radio adaptation. Both of those I would recommend over this film.
Ultimately, the book is too complex and too multi-layered to be shoehorned into a feature length movie. A gallant failure, this film.