For Nobel Prize winners only?

Rating: Null/10 (28 September 2011)

We went as a group, which included two retired academics (one a Professor), an intellectual woman with several publications to her name, and a medical doctor who is also an academic. None of us could make head or tail of this excruciatingly tedious, too-clever-by-half, pointlessly repetitious dog of a movie. The story is set during the 'Cold War', at a time when paranoia and reciprocal distrust was rampant on both sides of the 'Iron Curtain', for unclear reasons (a paradox which is admirably deconstructed in Hobsbawm's 'Age of Extremes'). It revolves around the squalid world of spies and double agents, whose boring lives are occasionally livened by a murder, or attempted murder, or two. In order to create an exotic background, the scene keeps rotating between London, Budapest and Istanbul which, at the time, may have sounded like destinations on other planets, but are now easily reached in a couple of hours on low-budget flights from Western Europe, and therefore fail to impress. The movie's 'hero' is apparently a secret agent called Smiley, who acts and behaves like a catatonic zombie throughout the over- two-hour-long tedium. It transpires that his wife has been unfaithful to him, yet it would be really surprising if she had stuck to such an unappealing, lifeless individual for more than a couple of years. According to reliable sources, there had been a previous incarnation of Smiley, played by Alec Guinness, who was apparently even more of a zombie. The movie is also marred by a series of flashbacks of unclear significance, some of which are repeated ad nauseam, with the result that the little comprehension one might have achieved is dissipated in the general confusion. Why it should be regarded as brilliant to make cryptic movies which perhaps one percent of cinema goers, if that, may appreciate, remains a mystery. Three cheers for Snow-white and the Seven Dwarfs! (the Disney version, of course).