If you took the attention to production detail of the TV show Mad Men and turned its gaze at the bland, gritty, ugly 70s instead of the slick, modern, idealistic 60s, you would get something that looked a lot like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s new film about the cold, detached players in the British spy game of its era. The story is an adaptation of a spy novel by John Le Carre that focuses mostly on the rooting out of a Russian mole high up in the British intelligence hierarchy; and like most secret agent spy movies it’s a dense plot with a lot of players, a lot of spy jargon, myriad conflicting motivations, and just a whole lot of information that needs to be processed by the viewer. Alfredson and his screenwriter try to help you along by pacing things glacially and lingering over all of the important little details, but it still doesn’t do enough to ensure that you’re going to understand everything that’s happening on the screen during your first watch, or even how grave the developments and revelations that play out over the course of the story are.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that you don’t really have to understand everything that happens in this movie to get something out of it. Understanding the broad strokes of the mole plot is enough, because what’s really on show here are the production design, photography, and performances. Though Britain in the 70s isn’t the most cinematic setting a movie can have, the level of detail that went into creating all of the beige blandness of this film’s world is pretty astounding to take in. And the costume designer, at least, adds some flair to the proceedings by giving all of the players unique looks. That’s all secondary to the performers who are bringing the characters to life, however. This film boasts a cast list including names like Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mark Strong; and all of these powerful British actors are just as great bringing these closed book, super paranoid characters to life as you would imagine. Oldman especially impresses in the lead role, putting on a clinic in minimalist acting that always keeps you concentrated on his face, even though it’s hardly ever doing anything. When the actor finally does emote once or twice in the film, it hits hard after all that stoicism.
But while each of these individual aspects of TTSS are kind of interesting to dissect on their own, when added up they equal a problem: it’s slow moving, but with good reason, it’s bland and drab, but impressively so, the characters are cold and closed off, but for dramatic effect; however, even with all those buts, that still makes this a slow, drab, cold trip to the movies. TTSS feels like something you could find on PBS in the afternoon and fall asleep to. All in all, that’s not the worse thing in the world to be, it can even be kind of pleasant on occasion, but it doesn’t make for a movie that’s easily recommended.
