Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Le Carré's celebrated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy flat-out fails in its efforts to grab ya in a breathless, page-turning spy thriller way. It achieves, however, something far more interesting – a striking look at what British intelligence really (okay, probably) was like in the early 1970s.

The intensity of the production design reaches near-fetish levels. You can practically feel the cracked leather cushions on the listening devices, the thick wires frayed twenty-five years after their World War II initiation. The dumbwaiter transporting files from one clean room to another moves just slow enough to let you sense the tug on the cords. This focus is no accident - this is what the movie is about. The infuriatingly precise, difficult and boring work that goes into collecting and securing intelligence.

This type of slow burn is not new. It reached its apex with Fred Zinnemann's Day of the Jackal in 1973 (and its nadir with the insufferable Corneliu Porumboiu's recent Police, Adjective.) This new turn, however, with its Budapest gallerias, London safe houses and Turkish front operations has all the trappings of what should be, you know, a ripping fun film.

It isn't. It's a stone cold bore.

It's a bore because everything takes forever to happen, and then when it does you simply don't care.

Okay, the plot. Gary Oldman is forced out of MI6, but is secretly brought back in because it is thought that the KGB have a man inside at the top. He must sniff out which of the well known British character actors is the mole. Eventually, he figures it out. And you absolutely won't care.

You won't care because there isn't a whole heckuva lot at stake - not from a modern audience's POV (Commies? Psssh.) and because we are kept so distant from these characters that it is impossible to care, trust or know any of them. When the big reveal comes it feels like a letdown. Then you realize that any possible ending would feel like a letdown.

But once all the spy stuff in this spy story flushes away, what remains in clear memory is the way the sound of the air changes when the MI6 top brass gather in their soundproof chamber. They meet in what is ostensibly a giant metal tank - like a mini submarine in the middle of a vast, unlit floor of a nondescript government building. Inside there is wallpaper and warm lighting, but you know there is no ventilation in there. It is one of a dozen spaces this film creates that you will feel that you know when the movie is done.

As Oldman chases down memories he returns time and again to an office Christmas party. The booze flows, the ties get loosened, the group sings a tongue-in-cheek round of "The Internationale." It is a scene more fitting in Antonioni's The Conformist than in Goldfinger. And don't even get me started on the music. I couldn't wait to run home and download a copy of Julio Iglaeias' live version of La Mer.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a thriller in the way Alfredson's Let the Right One In was a vampire film: kinda. In a weird way, I wish his source material wasn't John le Carre. You can tell that there is a good story here. (There is a much loved BBC miniseries that I have not seen, and I've read some online discussion that "there's no way to fit that book into one movie.") There is a leitmotif of the old guard (WWII-era vets) vs the new wave that probably should have resonated more, but left me with a "kids today got no respect" message and nothing more. Alfredson's has cut lots of the original text out, and I simply can't tell if it is a poor decision considering what could have been, or a genius move in that it makes Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the impressionistic painting of Cold War tales.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, I'll call this, then, a must-see for people who don't care much for conventional thrills, and love to be absorbed in a film's tone.