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.
