Film Review: Oldman's Anti-Bond ensnares in 'Tinker Tailor'

Jack English/Focus Features

Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley in Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of spy novelist John le Carré's "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

With mirthless humor, the agents of the British Secret Intelligence Service who maneuver through "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" -- whether the classic 1974 novel, the 1979 BBC miniseries or this new feature-film adaptation -- refer to their employer as "the Circus."

The term accurately identifies the agency as a place that values performance and trickery ("Operation Witchcraft" is on the agenda), but at the same time it radiates mockery and irony. The nickname identifies the service as a refuge for clowns while wryly spoofing the extremely uncarnivalesque grimness and secrecy that characterize a career in the Cold War Big Top.

Chief among the Circus' careerists is veteran agent George Smiley (whose name is another joke), played in the new film by Gary Oldman (whose name suddenly seems most appropriate). Smiley is the master spy as anti-James Bond: Efficient and cerebral, but unattractive and unexciting. He is gray and usually expressionless. His eyes are more blank than twinkling, so as to give nothing away.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

An intelligence officer is recalled from retirement when there are signs that one of the top-ranking officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service is a ...

Rating: R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language

Length: 127 minutes

Released: December 9, 2011 Limited

Cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Graham

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Writer: Bridget O'Connor, Peter Straughan

More info and showtimes »

Swedish director Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of spy novelist John le Carré's best-selling "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" -- famously adapted 32 years ago for British television, with Alec Guinness as Smiley -- is similarly deceptive and withholding. Sometimes the film loses its balance as it walks the fine line between control and inertness, between repression and coma, but it's an extraordinary production. In some ways it qualifies as a love story, but its passions are so hidden, many viewers may never notice.

Alfredson's previous film was the 2008 Swedish vampire masterpiece "Let the Right One In," and "Tinker Tailor" transports much of that movie's Nordic chilliness to its -- again -- anti-James Bond notion of unglamorous international espionage. These spies aren't so much globetrotters as globetrudgers: England is drizzly, Budapest is dun, Istanbul is dirty.

Even so, the locations exhale a melancholy beauty. In fact, although the camerawork is stealthy and unshowy (Hoyte Van Hoytema of "Let the Right One In" is the cinematographer), the film is among the most visually striking and purposeful of recent years. The busy production design, which takes full advantage of the spacious horizontal emphasis of Alfredson's widescreen compositions, is a marvel of authentic 1970s period detail and meaningful geometry: Windows, bookshelves and other rectangular elements frequently partition the frame into grids, to suggest entrapment and to echo the story's chess motif. (Before one shooting, a spy intentionally knocks a chair to the ground, like a captured chess piece.)

Scripted by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan, and fitted with a cast of superb British players, the film requires -- and repays -- attentive viewing. As the story begins, the chief of the Secret Service, a man known as "Control" (the great John Hurt), who enjoys his liquor and hates the influence of the "bloody Yanks," is warning his agents that a mole -- a traitor -- has burrowed within the Circus. (No wonder the cluttered sets suggest rabbit warrens and rat holes.) "Trust no one," is Control's advice to his agents, who are represented by a Who's Who of great United Kingdom actors: Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy and Bendict Cumberbatch, plus Sweden's David Dencik.

The mole apparently is passing information to "Karla," a top spy of the Soviet Union. Karla is unseen and mysterious, qualities that link him to another important if elliptical character: Smiley's unfaithful wife, Ann. The notion that Karla is as much Smiley's significant other as is his authentic spouse is important to Alfredson's presentation of the Cold War as a blueprint for social as well as political behavior. As Smiley says, the parties in this type of war are forever testing "the weaknesses in each other's systems." Yes, we are -- which is why the end of the Soviet empire has not meant the end of le Carré's relevance.

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" is at Malco's Paradiso.

-- John Beifuss: (901) 529-2394

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