Atmospheric spy game

Rating: Null/10 (16 March 2012)

"TTTS" could almost be one of those engaging board games, a spy game this one, designed and marketed by the Waddington Company in the UK in the 1960s (the story was actually set in 1973). The objective is to find a mole among 5 suspects, all people with power in the British secret services. Their nicknames, funny enough, align not so much with the characters as with the actors assigned to play them. "Tinker", with its ring of devious mischief, is midget-ish Toby Jones who rivalled Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning portrayal of Truman Capote with his own "Infamous" (2006), not Oscar-winning but equally brilliant. "Tailor" would serve as an allusion to the gentlemanly persona of Colin Firth. And who can be more qualified than Ciaran Hinds to be called "Soldier", although he is equally good (maybe even better) as a Russian president. Non-titular, the other two are David Dencik (veteran Swedish actor, seen recently in "The girl with the dragon tattoo", in both languages) as "Poor Man" and star protagonist Gary Oldman as "Beggarman".
Despite the simple ultimate objective, the plot seems convoluted, and not helped by the movie makers' inclination not to dish our easy divulgences you have come to expect from other suspense mysteries (Robert Downey Jr. "Sherlock Holmes", for example). But then, if even Ebert confesses to "I didn't always follow the allusions and connections", there doesn't appear to be anything that we the general audience need to worry about. On the other hand, to make things worse, there is a proliferation of character in addition to the five mentioned above. Two of them start the movie: John Hurt as the MI6 head who sends out Mark Strong as an agent to Hungary to follow a lead on the mole. Then there is an apparently defected front-line agent played by Tom Hardy (best remembered in "Inception") on whose activities the mysteries seem to hinge. Going after him is his immediate supervisor played by Benedict Cumberbatch (veteran British actor seen in a handful of popular British movies). While there are quite a few others, I'll only mention two more, both women, beautiful Polish (I think) actress Svetlana Khodchenkova as a defecting Russian spy and a brief appearance of unknown Russian actress Katrina Vasilieva as the protagonist's unfaithful wife.
Notice I have only used the name of the actors and also stayed away from getting into the plot in any detail. Watch the movie and let things unfold. And I repeat, if Ebert cannot follow everything, neither should we agonize ourselves over trying to do so. A clear-enough picture does emerge at the end and if we miss a little detail here and there, so what? The beauty of this movie is in the atmospheric recreation of an almost dream-like world of intriguing espionage and the uniformly excellent acting, lead by Oldman and Hurt.