I had a lot of good food when the two Mrs. Bradleys and I visited my daughter in Washington, D.C., over Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, where our whirlwind itinerary—with which the senior Mrs. B was hard pressed to keep up!—included the Washington, Lincoln, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, and MLK monuments, plus one building of the National Gallery. Some of said food was prepared by Alexandra herself, at the apartment Madame BOF found for her and boyfriend Thomas on Connecticut Avenue, with which they’ve done wonders during their relatively brief time there so far, and where she finally introduced the Moms to one of her favorite films, Moulin Rouge! But the best meal I had was a delicious helping of crow called Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
I’ve long called the 1979 miniseries based on John le Carré’s novel one of the best adaptations of anything, anywhere, ever, inspiring me to read the book, one of my Top 10, and most of his other adventures of “incongruous spy” George Smiley. I’ve watched Alec Guinness as Smiley in both the miniseries and its 1982 sequel, Smiley’s People, countless times, and despite running times of more than five hours apiece, I found them utterly riveting, to say nothing of flawlessly capturing le Carré’s characters and plots. So when I heard that this satisfyingly complex Cold War thriller was being boiled down into a two-hour feature—even one starring the formidable Gary Oldman and directed by Sweden’s Tomas Alfredson, of Let the Right One In fame—I was utterly aghast.
But then I heard about some of the other casting (John Hurt as Smiley’s erstwhile boss, Control, and Colin Firth as Bill Haydon), and I got a little encouraged, and then I read some of those rave reviews, and I started to wonder if they could really pull it off. So, is it as good or as rich as the miniseries? No. Does Oldman incarnate Smiley-as-flesh the way Guinness did, so successfully that le Carré said he could no longer write him without seeing Guinness in his mind? No. Did a superb cast and crew—including Oldman—bring to life a script (by a couple of which the wife, sadly, died before its release) that manages to distill the essence of le Carré’s epic of espionage, in the process creating a breathtakingly excellent film that is top-notch on all levels? Hell yeah.
Here’s the set-up: Control sends Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to Budapest to meet a Hungarian defector who will reveal the identity of a mole, or double agent, in the highest echelon of British intelligence (aka the Circus). The suspects are Percy Alleline (Toby Jones), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik), Haydon, and Control’s right-hand man, Smiley. When the report comes in that Prideaux has been shot dead, Control and Smiley are tossed out in favor of Alleline’s gang of four, but after Control dies and AWOL Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) resurfaces with a story about a mole, the reluctant Smiley is brought out of retirement by bureaucrat Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), who oversees the Circus, to pick up the trail where Control left off.
Smiley recruits Tarr’s boss, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), a protégé of George’s whom the Alleline regime had shunted off to a backwater division called the Scalphunters, and Mendel (Roger Lloyd-Pack), a retired Special Branch man he’d met on an earlier case. He calls upon the memories of similarly disfavored Circus vets Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham)—an amalgam of the eponymous character and le Carré’s Sam Collins—and research expert Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke) to help him sift through the facts and lies. Among the casualties of the shorter format are George’s serial-adulterer wife, Ann (Katrina Vasilieva), and nemesis, Karla, neither of whom we see in full, although in general, the screenwriters preserve that which is most essential to the tale.
Those in our party who had seen the miniseries felt that the film might actually appeal more to viewers already familiar with the story, who would appreciate the foreshadowings and nuances, but of course it’s impossible for us to see it through virgin eyes. And, aside from the inevitable compression, it was interesting to see the choices they made, with this version depicting or even creating some things the original did not; I only noticed two notable instances of stuff that I don’t remember from either the book or the miniseries, but won’t reveal them here. As with the show, there were many unfamiliar names and/or faces in the cast, though I recognized Jones as the guy who played Arnim Zola in Captain America, mostly because he looks like a Jack Kirby creation!
BRADLEY ON FILM 
Though I have never read the novel and my memories of the original miniseries, while positive, are admittedly hazy, I do agree with several of the objections to the latest film adaptation as detailed by Peter Hitchens (brother of the recently deceased Christopher Hitchens):
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/09/tinker-tailor-soldier-travesty.html
Even if you are not in agreement, I think Hitchens raises some interesting points and creates a good jumping-off point for dissecting and discussing the story in book, miniseries, and film format.
Looks like Tomas Alfredson is making a bit of a resume for himself.
So far I’ve only seen the remake of Let the Right One In, which I liked, but I’m eager to catch the original.
I think it would be highly unfortunate for anyone to read Mr. Hitchens’s review first if he or she plans to see this new version of TTSS, and would encourage people not to do so. He is certainly correct about the changes that were made (including the two I alluded to but chose not to enumerate in my post), and I too saw no specific reason for many of them. But the process of adaptation in itself usually entails some changes, and I try not to object to them on general principle (i.e., to object to changes just because they are changes), nor did many of those he cited bother me while watching the film. I general, I have to chalk this up to what my friend and I call “The PLATOON Effect” (so called because of the number of fellow Vietnam veterans who saw Oliver Stone’s film and disagreed wildly over whether he had “gotten” the war right). Mr. Hitchens and I obviously both saw the same film, both love the novel, and both love the miniseries. And yet…somehow, I saw a well-made film that I felt captured the story’s essence despite the inevitable compression, and he saw a travesty. Yet he reveals so much in his review that I think a potential viewer would be swayed against the film, as perhaps I might have, so I would advocate seeing it and forming one’s own opinion.
I read the book in college and saw the TV series a couple of years ago on DVD. I liked the movie, though my family and I had to discuss it on the ride home for dopey me to figure a few things out…
I think it would be a bit of a challenge to a viewer who either was unfamiliar with the story or didn’t remember it very well. Strange as it sounds, I think the movie really may be geared toward people who already know the story well.
I thought it was an excellent film, but I, too, feel that it was not well-suited to an audience unfamiliar with the story. He is a difficult author to present in a regular-length feature film, and even THE CONSTANT GARDENER–one of my favorite films–took me two or more viewings to really understand. He is so incredibly nuanced that the mini-series format was just much better geared to his style. That’s not to say that the new film didn’t do a great job…because it did…but more that it made it difficult for new audiences to appreciate what they were watching.
As for Hitchens, I have respect for their importance but that family seems to love the sound of their own voices. I wouldn’t take what he says too seriously. He makes some good points, but he also has no sense of what an adaptation is, as apparently in his world they have to be literal mountings of the precise words of the text. Sometimes that can be great, and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD is a fabulous film, and so is the original TINKER TAILOR. But not everything has to be done that way, and it’s disrespectful to film as a creative art form to say that no adaptation should ever make changes. In fact it’s just juvenile.
Well said. As I’ve often observed, adaptation is itself an art, and does not necessarily require absolute fidelity. To give one example, many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films would have suffered considerably if they’d been faithful to their sourceworks. It’s a question of knowing when and what to change…