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Movie Takes
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Lots of the Cold War era’s world-weary moral equivalence, but without the financially risky anti-Americanism.
Although I didn’t much care for Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, I should begin by giving it its due. The movie does a fantastic job of conveying what Britain looked, sounded, and even smelled like in 1973, which was the year I arrived there for what turned out to be a nearly 15-year stay spanning the transition from the Britain of the post-war era to the threshold of the post-Cool Britannia of today. The clothes, the cars, the general dinginess, and shabbiness of everything is captured perfectly, so far as I can see, in spite of the odd false note like having George Smiley (Gary Oldman) and an associate dining in a Wimpy Bar. Obviously, the Wimpy Bar has to be there in order to give us the full flavor of the period, but men of their class wouldn’t have been caught dead in one. Movies these days are generally pretty good at re-creating the material past, but this one is a reminder of the importance of also getting the moral and intellectual and spiritual past right as well, for it cannot be understood apart from that cultural context.
In its case, that means the John le Carré novel of 1974 and the 1979 BBC television adaptation of it starring Alec Guinness as well as the history of the Cold War on which both purport to be a distinctive gloss. Unlike Mr. Alfredson’s previous film, Let the Right One In, which was a completely original take on the vampire legend, Tinker Tailor places itself squarely in the middle of the now well-established tradition of cultural customs and concepts with which it deals — partly, perhaps, in order to suggest a continuity between that tradition and current political realities with which it would otherwise seem to have little in common. In other words, now not only Cold War spies but spies in general are seen as inhabiting that famously “twilit” world invented by Mr. le Carré to express his own conviction of moral ambiguity and, in consequence, a near moral equivalence between Communist slave states and what used to be called “the West.”
That this is an important preface to any discussion of Mr. Afredson’s movie is suggested by the unconsciously hilarious remark of Manohla Dargis, a reviewer for the New York Times, that “Tinker, Tailor is set against a geopolitical (and movie) moment that is almost quaintly, reassuringly old-fashioned, a time when enemy agents had names like Boris, and a red flag with a hammer and sickle made the ideological and political stakes clear.” She is of course not alone in conveniently forgetting how very unclear the ideological and political stakes were to so many of her fellow lefties at the time, not excluding Mr. le Carré himself. But he, at least, has always been admirably consistent in preferring moral muddle to clarity — except, that is, when it comes to his implacable anti-Americanism. Fortunately, the economics of the movie business and the need for the film to make enough cis-Atlantic money to repay its production costs require that there should be no more than hints of Mr. le Carré’s views of the United States in this version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Anyway, I imagine he would agree with the editorialist for the Guardian who sees his hero not as reassuringly old-fashioned but rather as reassuringly British. “George Smiley is the sort of spy this country believes it ought to have,” this person confidently insisted: “a bit shabby, academic, basically loyal, and sceptical of the enthusiasms of his political masters. Smiley would not, it is safe to say, have wanted to modify intelligence to encourage the Iraq war. He was never real, but we need his type still.” Trust a leftie to prefer unreal intelligence officers! And what, exactly, is that adverbial modifier “basically” meant to convey about the loyalty of this paragon? Mr. Oldman’s George Smiley, like Mr. le Carré’s, is apparently loyal tout court, even if at least one of his colleagues is not.
Yet I think maybe the Guardian, Mr. le Carré and Mr. Alfredson, a Swede, are all going for the same thing here, which is a sense that, for the post-imperial Briton with a proper sense of his own guilt about continuing to exist at all, loyalty always must be qualified because it carries with it the taint of patriotism. And patriotism in the left-wing view of history amounts to a retrogression to the “ethnocentrism” of empire. Enemies today’s Britisher may still have — even enemies that he still must fight against. Yet he must never, never allow himself to feel morally superior to them. I fancy it is because Americans are supposed to be lacking in such scrupulosity and accordingly suffer from way too much moral self-confidence that they strike the aristocratically-minded Mr. le Carré as being so vulgar and distasteful. One supposes that this vital lesson cannot be taught us too many times, which would explain the otherwise baffling decision basically to remake the 1979 mini-series and have Mr. Oldman doing an impersonation not of George Smiley but of Alec Guinness playing George Smiley.
Obviously, the key moment in the film comes when Smiley says to the Russian spymaster, Karla, “We’re not so very different, you and I. We both spend our lives looking for the weaknesses in each other’s systems, but there is as little worth on your side as there is on mine.” In the context, this is supposed to be a ploy to help persuade Karla to betray his own side. As Smiley believes, the latter is about to be shot on his return to Russia anyway, so it shouldn’t take much to bring him over. But when Karla refuses to rise to the bait, Smiley says, “That’s when I knew he could be beaten. He was a fanatic, and the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.” Of course the secret (and not so secret) doubts all turn out to be on the non-fanatical British side, which leaves Smiley’s ostensibly cynical expression of moral equivalence hanging in the air, the thing that everybody takes away from the movie because it sounds so like a proper movie profundity. “We’re not so very different, you and I.”
Oh, please! Here’s how different he is. Put those same words in the mouth of the Russian and watch the audience crack up. The very idea is ridiculous. That must be why Karla doesn’t actually appear in the movie except as a disembodied voice. In the mini-series, a mute and bearded Patrick Stewart played the part, but even he was a standing rebuke to the facile notion that he and Smiley had anything important in common. To be sure, the novel was more subtle about it, but it was an empty paradox even at the time. Now it’s a cliché, and one that Mr. Alfredson cannot avoid, so central is it to the character of Smiley and the whole le Carré franchise. It sits inertly at the center of things in his movie and makes everything look as if it is taking place in slow motion. Especially Mr. Oldman’s part of everything. It’s as if he has to pause for a moment every time the camera turns to him in order to remind himself to look suitably lugubrious about his efforts on his country’s behalf, since all the weight of Britain’s decline is on his shoulders.
Not that Mr. Alfredson and his screenwriters, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, have nothing new to add to the formula. It is perhaps only a matter of emphasis, but in keeping with more contemporary interests and concerns, they have supplied even more of a personal counterpart to the political by adding to the secrets his spies have evidently become so damaged by having to keep that of three “closeted” homosexuals, one of whom is the man eventually exposed as the traitor Smiley is in pursuit of. The gay element here is perhaps not without warrant in the novel — as in the history of the “Cambridge Spies” on which it was partly based — but cultural changes of the last 30 or 40 years have given a different meaning to it, and one that is bound to obscure or even negate the novel’s moral meaning.
In the context of today’s sexual politics, that is, bringing these spies’ sexual orientation into the foreground tends to make the film’s central question of ultimate loyalties look more than ever like a matter of gay lovers’ jealousies, bred in the hot-house atmosphere of pre-war public schools and all-male Oxbridge colleges — nearly all of which have now got with the times. That orientation of the material, in turn, points us towards the paradoxically sexless and sanitized era of Stella Rimington and Eliza Manningham-Buller, who have become the public faces of MI5 in the more recent past, and a prominent graffito in the movie reading: “The Future is Female.” So it has proven to be, too — not least in the fact that the intelligence service is now allowed to have a public face.
In short, it all seems rather academic, this little trip down memory lane, now that that world along with the Cold War which seemed so important at the time have been swept and tidied away in the box called old-fashioned. Now, in the age of Wikileaks, we cannot but realize that state secrets themselves — like the old boys’ networks that used to keep them and the patriotic impulses once thought to be their justification — have become more or less discredited in the decades since John le Carré wrote his Smiley novels. And we may also realize that this is a state of affairs to which those novels always looked forward with unseemly eagerness, rather as his traitor in Tinker Tailor does to the collapse of the “ugly,” shabby, morally grubby Western world he despises. At the risk of sounding like a fanatic, I can’t find anything in my bosom that returns an echo to such world-weary and pessimistic self-satisfaction.
About the Author
James Bowman, our movie and culture critic, is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of Honor: A History and Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture, both published by Encounter Books.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (22) | Leave a comment
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Hal G. P. Colebatch| 1.11.12 @ 7:09AM
An excellent review! Informative and profound.
Alan Brooks| 1.11.12 @ 12:50PM
"Lots of the Cold War era's world-weary moral equivalence, but without the financially risky anti-Americanism."
It has always been world-weary moral equivalence.
Alan Brooks| 1.11.12 @ 11:51PM
Mr. B.:
you weren't suggesting moral equivalence began in '45 and ended in '89, were you?
Stuart Koehl| 1.11.12 @ 8:35AM
Maybe my wife and I are obtuse, or perhaps we were just too deeply involved in the Cold War, but neither Le Carre's books, nor the two outstanding Alec Guinness miniseries ever conveyed to us a sense of moral equivalence. Of moral ambiguity, surely--we observed enough of that at first hand--but not once were we even slightly inclined to say that there were no moral differences between the Soviet Union and the West, for which reason we never saw George Smiley as an "anti-hero", but as the real thing.
Indeed, we never saw Smiley as the stand-in for Le Carre in "Tinker, Tailor"--if the author has a voice in that novel, it's Bill Haydon, the traitor, who makes clear (as does Le Carre in his public statements) the real object of his disdain is not the West in general, but the United States and the role it has played in usurping what he (and Bill Haydon) perceived as Britain's rightful place in the world.
So, at the end of the day, Le Carre's "moral equivalence" is really nothing of the sort--not for a minute does he really believe that the Soviet Union and the post-War West were interchangeable entities--but just a cynical cover for his anti-Americanism and cultural snobbery.
Occam's Tool| 1.11.12 @ 6:51PM
Le Carre wanted to defect to the Soviet side.
Countering his view of the spy business, a beautiful "Boom, boom, boom! Out go the Lights!" episode in Iran which killed yet another one of their dwindling numbers of mathematically literate scientists... Motorcycle ride up, magnetic bomb, assailants drive off---very Bondian. Or, more precisely, Isser Harel-ish.
Stuart Koehl| 1.11.12 @ 8:07PM
I seriously doubt that Le Carre wanted to defect--the sorry story of Philby, McLean and Burgess was far too well known, and once he left MI-6, there was far too much money to be made.
As regards alleged Mossod wet work in Iran, I note the parallels to the campaign of intimidation waged against Nasser's tame German rocket scientists during the early 1960s.
Vern Crisler| 1.11.12 @ 10:09AM
My understanding is the Smiley is the anti-James Bond. He's not at all suave or sophisticated, but rather bumbling and slow. Not quite as comical as the Pink Panther, or as calculating as Columbo, but he still muddles through and gets the job done.
Le Carre's moral equivalency is of course obscene, but the Smiley books can also be seen as an attempt to rescue the spy genre from the ridiculousness of gadgetry and glamor.
Stuart Koehl| 1.11.12 @ 8:08PM
If you read the books, Smiley is anything but "slow"--he is quiet and methodical, and the only area in which he bumbles is his marriage to Lady Anne. His plots are well conceived, he is a highly discerning judge of character, and he knows how to conduct an interrogation to break even the hardest subject.
Petronius| 1.11.12 @ 10:26AM
For the inside skinny on the animus behind all this, read C, the biography of Sir Stewart Menzies, by Anthony Cave Brown. He headed SIS. And the contra temps between his offices, SOE, and the U.S. intelligence services sets the table for what was to follow.
Dan| 1.11.12 @ 11:54AM
Actually, the moment that the British let in the homosexuals, with their anti-middle class prejudices, everything was set in motion.
Their detestation of the moral world around them, their contempt for those their likeminded of today term "breeders," all of that inexorably was going to spill out into hatred of community, hatred of country.
Ultimately treason.
Treason against country.
Treason against Empire.
Treason against the West.
Treason against the vestiges of Christianity and Christendom.
Those the book itself terms "pinks and queens" were evil, and did evil.
The outrage of the movie is that it lauds those that betrayed, it normalizes those the movie exposed as pathological and traitorous, instead of exposing the role of the "homintern" inside SIS, it turns Peter Guillam's character into a homosexual too.
Just a bizarre twist of historical reality.
It's not a coincidence that Bradley Manning, who recently betrayed this country, was likewise a flaming and rabid homosexual, who crossed the threshold into treason because of a typical tiff within that community.
Dan| 1.11.12 @ 11:46AM
This is a poorly written review.
Emphasis upon the word "written."
Again and again in the article, the reader is left struggling trying to fathom what the author of the review intended.
Now the "substance" of his review may be spot on. I don't know.
And the reason I don't know is that repeatedly I was unable to discern what the author meant.
This piece craved an aggressive editor.
J.C.Eaton| 1.11.12 @ 1:04PM
Well, I thought it was a jim-dandy review...as far as it went. The artistic problems are more or less overlooked though. To have great film or indeed any kind of entertainment predicated on word, you must have great WRITING! Le Carre is NOT a great writer....or even a very good one. His plots are transparent[figuring out the villain in this one is child's play], his characters uninteresting, and his dialogue ponderous and unengaging. His stories are gray not because of his world-viw or even, I'd trow, his mood. They're gray because he is a talentless hack. Best.
Ron| 1.11.12 @ 1:10PM
Quoting "The Guardian?" Really, now...as if The Guardian has ever had anything bad to say about left leaning writers or detestation for the right. I mean this statement: "Smiley would not, it is safe to say, have wanted to modify intelligence to encourage the Iraq war" said it all to me about the movie. Thank you, but no, I think this is one I shall skip.
scfanjl| 1.11.12 @ 7:31PM
Having seen the movie, I find this review excellent. It was nice to see a movie that was a slower, cerebral pace but the story told was lame.
Stuart Koehl| 1.11.12 @ 8:10PM
The problem is the story is too deeply textured to be captured in a two hour film--the six hour miniseries was barely adequate, but if you want to see and understand the story, you must either read the book or see the miniseries, without which you'll never be able to understand what the hell is going on. For those of us who have, the movie is much like a Reader's Digest Condensed Book.
Paul Zachary| 1.11.12 @ 8:22PM
An interesting review that draws out much of the pathetic anti-Americanism and moral equivalency that LeCarre is always guilty of. As a movie, however, this new film can't hold a candle to the original series, which had a palpable sense of menace and danger in the world of espionage. Here, everything seems rather tepid and mildly inconvenient. Jim Prideaux looks none the worse for wear after being tortured by Karla; Peter Guillam is now a boyish-looking homosexual who looks lost most of the time and Bill Haydon appears rather bored with the whole business. There is no sense of the brutal clash of ideologies, people and freedoms that was the Cold War. No wonder Oldman did his best imitation of Guinness. There was nothing else to hang on to, or build from, in this film.
POST American| 1.11.12 @ 11:45PM
---------------------FINAL WORD-----------------------
LeCarre's been nowhere since the 70's.
Retreading the Tinker Tailor riff seems
not even pointless in 2012.
MEANWHILE
"Korea, and NOT the long gone world
wars [--or the Cold War --'melting together']
is swiftly emerging as the definitive, the
pivotal conflict of the 20th century
viz a viz the 21st."
LeCarre's been a complete NO SHOW
and COP OUT on this ---and the greater,
decades long, systemative capstone Globalist
RED China TREASON OP which has always
been behind it.
---That's right --long term --ALWAYS
behind it.
LeCarre [ie Cornwell] now just another
self-important lodge lizard dispensing
yesterday's authorized ambiguity.
-----------------------ALAS
Sars| 1.12.12 @ 6:59AM
What gets me about the TTSP reprise is why -- besides the money -- anyone would want to remake it in the first place. Today's undereducated movie goers have no sense of history or, more specifically, the tumultuous events of the Cold War (however skewed by Mr. Le Carrie). The understated original miniseries was superb British repertory theater. (Gary Oldman is a fine actor, but Alec Guinness will always own the Smiley role.) What's next? Justin Bieber as Rhett Butler?
Stuart Koehl| 1.12.12 @ 12:47PM
Well, that is the question, isn't it? I guess the answer is someone thought it would make money. And, in fact, after a slow start, it seems to be picking up steam. A lot of people did not see the original Alec Guinness miniseries, and most people haven't purchased it on DVD, so they have no point of comparison.
Lots of stuff gets remade that shouldn't.
ONTIME| 1.12.12 @ 2:18PM
This is a movie for spy fans, full of twist and a deliberate plot to infltrate the western intelligence gathering. It is also a testimony to the perseverance of those entrusted to guard the walls of freedom and why we should be thankfull there are real patriots among us all to keep the faith and make the freedom wreckers pay....I hope we see more films that pay tribute to these folks.
POST American| 1.12.12 @ 10:43PM
"-----KOREA and NOT the long gone
World Wars ---is emerging as -the- pivotal
conflict of the 20th century viz a viz
the 21st."
-Globalist betrayal--RED China empowerment
--mind control--police state surveillance--
TREASON---'AWE--stare--'IT'--HE'--
'DE--in-dust--Re--ALL--ization'
--psychopathic X--speediancy
---EUGENICS and GENOCIDE.
It's all there---------------!
The themes we're dealing with NOW
across the West --THINK KOREA 1952.
---------------------THINK FAST------------------------
---SAVE THIS POST---
---MARK THESE WORDS---
Ol' Will| 1.13.12 @ 12:10PM
The review is opaque because the movie it reviewed is opaque.
This is the worst film I have ever seen. From start to finish, nothing was made clear. The photography was messy and annoying. The dialogue, when there was any, in addition to never advancing the plot in a logical way, was muddled, mumbled, covered with music and other noises, fuzzy in sound quality, and usually seemed irrelevant to what was going on visually. There was, also, practically no indication of what motivated the characters.
The flashbacks were so muddled that it was almost impossible to mentally reassemble the events into some reasonable chronological sequence. There hasn’t been such a confusing chronology since “Last Year at Marienbad”.
The line of evidence was also so obscure that one was left wondering if the right man wound up in prison - or alternately, why not all of them? Why were the suspects suspects? Why hire one of the suspects to be the investigator? Nothing made sense.
I was forced to conclude that if the movie was to be understood at all, the viewer had to first read the novel and then watch the miniseries. And indeed, some reviewers at other sites made just this point. So what's the point of making the movie? A film made from a novel should be self-contained not dependent upon prior knowledge of the source material by the viewer. See Dr. Zhivago or the Narnia movies as examples.
My wife was forced to conclude that all of the suspects (tinker, tailor, etc.) were moles; that Smiley eliminated all of the others, and then maneuvered himself into the ultimate mole position, that of Control. In addition, she wondered if Smiley hadn’t also turned homosexual based on the sly smile on Peter’s face at the end of the film.
I am also forced to conclude, because of the general crappiness of this film, that Le Carre owes me $7.50.
Go see “The Debt”, instead.