The best Le Carre adaptation since Smiley's People.

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2012)

The period of 1973/1974 is very much Britain's darkest post war days: IRA terrorism, inflation, strikes, football hooliganism, police corruption. And on top of all this the Cold War cast its dark nuclear shadow over everything. It was the age of decline and pessimism. John Le Carre's 1974 novel TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY is a book very much reflective of the nation's post-war decline.
Now, the novel has been turned into a major British film by Thomas Alfredson and is the best Le Carre adaptation since the BBC's SMILEY'S PEOPLE back in 1982. Central to the film's success is quite wonderful production design which evokes the era of 73/74 with remarkable precision, particularly the low-tech London HQ of the Circus (Le Carre's name for MI6)- a pre-digital world of dial telephones, shelves full of paper files, reel to reel tape recorders, cine film all housed in a large warehouse type building where the main conference room is a sound proofed portakabin.
Head of the Circus is Control (John Hurt). When a mission in Budapest to uncover a Soviet mole in the Circus is blown and the agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) shot and captured, Control and his aide George Smiley (Gary Oldman) are forced into retirement. However, the months pass and Smiley is called upon by the Home Office - there really is a Mole in British Intelligence. They now know this via an AWOL Circus operative called Ricky Tarr (Tom Hardy) whose affair with Irina - the wife of a Russian agent in Istanbul - leads to him learning about the Soviet infiltration. However, as soon as he alerts London his message is intercepted, his senior murdered and Irina kidnapped and shipped to Moscow and killed.
The film is very complex and key events told through a series of flashbacks. Yet it's full of 'moments' which lodge in the mind. We see something I've not seen on screen before - a British Intelligence Christmas party with all the key personnel attending. It's also full of wonderful performances such as Kathy Bates in a marvellous scene as ex- intelligence analyst Connie Sachs and Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillame, Smiley's man on the inside. However, they key role of Bill Haydon (Colin Firth) is surprisingly underwritten. The end of the movie feels rushed.
At the centre of it all is a commanding piece of screen acting by Gary Oldman as Smiley. He never speaks for the first 15 minutes of so of the film and it's a quiet and restrained performance. At one point he delivers a monologue to Guillame about how he once met his Russian opposite number and nemesis Karla and it holds your attention for the sheer force of acting. This is Oldman's tour-de-force confirming him as one of the great British actors of our generation.