One of the most well made, as well as slow paced and convoluted films, of the year!

Rating: 7/10 (26 February 2012)

'TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY': Three and a Half Stars (Out of Five)
One of the most well made, as well as slow paced and convoluted films, of the year is this British spy thriller. The film is based on the 1974 novel of the same name by John le Carre about an Ex-British secret service agent named George Smiley and his efforts to find a Soviet double agent. The film stars Gary Oldman (in an Academy Award nominated performance), Colin Firth, Tom Hardy (one of my favorite up and coming actors), Mark Strong, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds and John Hurt. It was written by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan and was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It was directed by Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson (who also directed the popular vampire thriller 'LET THE RIGHT ONE IN') and scored perfectly by Alberto Iglesias (in which it also received an Academy Award nomination). On a technical level the movie is near perfect but lacks any true substance or heart to make it a truly great film (that and the fact that it's near impossible to follow).
The film is set in the 1970's during the cold war and begins with a British Intelligence agent named Jim Prideaux (Strong) on assignment in Hungary. After the mission goes horribly wrong the head of the British Intelligence, Control (Hurt), and his right-hand man George Smiley (Oldman) take most of the blame and are forced into early retirement. The true reason the assignment went haywire is due to a Russian agent among the senior officers and Control was on to them (the Hungary mission was actually a plan to identify the mole). Control dies shortly after retirement (due to an ongoing illness) but Smiley is asked to come out of retirement, by a senior officer, and investigate new information discovered by agent Ricky Tarr (Hardy) on the mole. Smiley sees this as an opportunity to clear his name and seek vengeance by bringing the double agent to justice.
Like I said the movie is masterfully made on a technical level, the perfect subtlety of each scene is amazing but the movie is almost too subtle. It takes way too long to get going and is never clear about almost anything. I had to see the movie twice just to fully understand it, paying much more attention to every detail the second time around. I sometimes like to give these kinds of movies credit for demanding a repeat viewing and not spoon-feeding the viewer but there is such a thing as being too vague (as well as being too slow paced). The movie crawls along at an agonizingly dull pace and this is part of the reason the film is too hard to follow; if you're like me your mind will often drift while viewing a movie like this which makes it easy to miss important details thus making it even more frustrating to follow and thus more painfully dull to watch. At least the movie does have a lot to offer in other ways (great acting, beautiful cinematography and a mesmerizing score) but the movie is not involving enough to warrant such craftsmanship. At it's heart it's a routine story with rather dull characters making it yet another example of style over substance (to the fullest extent).
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