Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

[metirish]

There's a mole, right at the top of the Circus. And he's been there for years.

I'm a huge Le Carre fan and I feel unless you read the book this movie version might be rather confusing. Having said that I think the movie was faithful to the book.Le Carre of course in another lifetime was David Cornwall one of the British spies who was betrayed by Kim Philby, so he knows the game here. In his mind spy game is as much bureaucratic s it is field work, thus in the movie as in the book you have a lot of British public school educated middle aged men sitting around in hushed conversations sipping tea and trying to ferret information, or get a few extra pounds to get the next phase rolling..... dealing with annoying under secretaries at the foreign office and such.

Don't expect Jason Bourne , instead you get some fine acting headed by Goldman and several British veterans.

Control is convinced that a mole is in place and sends Jim to Budapest to meet a man that knows, it goes wrong and in the aftermath Control and Smiley get ousted......yet Smiley gets called back out of retirement by Lacon the government undersecretary with Circus oversight after he gets a call from an agent wanting to trade.....


The movie like the book is a series of flashbacks piecing the story together, I guess this is where it is hard to fit all those layers from the book into a movie.....still , I liked it a lot, I thought the characters in my mind were perfectly cast , Percy was especially well cast .....great atmosphere ,dreary cold war stuff.....

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

I found it completely incomprehensible. Didn't care who did it, and not even sure what he did.

It's mostly my fault, I know, but once you lose it there's no catching up so I took a nap.

[Vic Sage]

i like Oldman, when he's making the effort to restrain himself, but i have no patience for cold war thrillers. they generally don't thrill me at all, with some exceptions (DAY OF THE CONDOR comes to mind; maybe the ODESSA FILE).

[Frayed Knot]

I tend to like cold war style intrigue but instead found myself totally confused as well.
Maybe it was partially my fault for being kind of tired when I saw it but in the end I'm not sure whether I wound up not following the plot because I was nodding off or if I was nodding off because the plot was so dense.

[Guest themetfairy]

Boring as all hell and confusing to boot.

[RealityChuck]

I tend to like these more realistic spy stories (if you've never seen Sandbaggers, you owe it to yourself to rent it), and I didn't find this particularly hard to follow (though I had seen the Alec Guinness version years ago, but remembered very little of it).

Oldman was too young to play Smiley, though.