Summary

In the early 1970s during the Cold War, the head of British Intelligence, Control, resigns after an operation in Budapest, Hungary goes badly wrong. It transpires that Control believed one of four senior figures in the service was in fact a Russian agent - a mole - and the Hungary operation was an attempt to identify which of them it was. Smiley had been forced into retirement by the departure of Control, but is asked by a senior government figure to investigate a story told to him by a rogue agent, Ricky Tarr, that there was a mole. Smiley considers that the failure of the Hungary operation and the continuing success of Operation Witchcraft (an apparent source of significant Soviet intelligence) confirms this, and takes up the task of finding him.

Review

The movie brilliantly conjures up the heavy weather of Le Carré's spy game: it involves nothing like derring-do, but a ritual of humiliation and a ballet of shame in which the security services play their part in managing decline and managing denial, and the Brit spooks try to rebuild their reputation with the Americans – the only people with secrets worth keeping – in their calamitous post-Philby world. Alfredson shows how the profession of secrets meshes with sexual shame, heterosexual and homosexual: perhaps because married womanisers and in-the-closet gay men are good at pretence and doublethink, and perhaps because they yearn for a world which makes a virtue of deceit.

The somnambulist gloom of Tinker, Tailor is animated by two chillingly realised setpieces: in one, an agent named Prideaux (Mark Strong) is summoned by the spy-chief Control, played by John Hurt, and ordered to go to Budapest where he is to bring in a Hungarian general who wants to come over to the west and reveal the mole's identity. His initial meeting with a third party at a far-from-innocuous cafe takes place in circumstances crackling with unease, an almost Truman Show theatre of paranoia. A droplet of sweat from the waiter's brow lands on the table, like the first sign of a thunderstorm. The meeting ends in calamity, and is to trigger the forced resignation of Control and Smiley, an unjust humiliation they accept like the good chaps they are.

The second setpiece takes place in Turkey, and involves the young hothead Ricki Tarr, played by Tom Hardy, the nearest thing this drama has to a Bond figure. Tarr is an other-ranks figure in his blue denim shirt, not a member of the Smiley officer class, spying on a louche military attache. Alfredson creates a tremendous Rear Window tableau of sex and violence in the distant lighted windows of grim apartment buildings. Romantically, in the middle of this bloodbath, Tarr is to fall in love with this man's beautiful wife Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova), who is in a position to give him far more important intelligence than the man he is following. At a crucial stage in the proceedings, Tarr promises to help Smiley, but makes him give a vital promise in return, and the consequent betrayal colours the drama with yet more dishonesty and bad faith.

This Tinker Tailor is a weightless, slo-mo nightmare taking place in what looks like an aquarium filled with poison gas instead of water: I found it more gripping and involving than any crash-bang action picture, and it is anchored by Gary Oldman's tragic mandarin, a variation on Alec Guinness which transfers the emphasis away from George Smiley's wounded feelings to his cool capacity for unconcern in the face of violence, a hint of a daredevil past, long mummified by bureaucratic self-control and a schoolmasterly scorn for his victim's weakness and disloyalty, while seeing how easily any agent could give the wretched Judas kiss. What a treat this film is, and what an unexpected thrill.

Peter Bradshaw Guardian