So I was listening to "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" for the 12thish time....

[napchic]

And holding something that was glued and drying in one hand, and caressing the Gary Oldman Wikipedia page trying to find out why. Thefuck. He didn't get an Oscar in 2011 for this role because it is the single most restrained, microscopically subtle, and orgasmically badass performances on film...

I was doing all that, and read this sentence:
"Ryan

Comments

[napchic]

I may have seen it twenty times. :)

I love the visual shorthand they use in the storytelling like having Gary's character George wake up alone on one side of a double bed in a room with lots of women's perfume bottles on the dresser. That's so much clearer and more evocative than verbal exposition explaining he had a woman in his life for some time, and she's gone.

But yes, his performance.
I am weak before it :)

The breathtakingly closed off George.
The George who learns in the middle of a meeting that his lifelong career is over because he showed selfless loyalty to his duty, his chain of command, and his boss, Control, and George's response is to blink and leave the building without a word to anyone...not even to Control, the man he lost his job over... That George.

You later see that same George twist around a chess piece that proves Control suspected George was a spy. The emotion that fights to show on George's face in that moment is brilliant... So much hurt and anger held so firmly in check.

George was able to convey exactly how he felt about the need for UK and US intelligence to join forces, and his opinion of US interrogation practices by his way of pronouncing "The Americans" in a sentence when he spoke about meeting their archenemy, Karla. It was gloriously restrained distain.

Even the back of his head acted. There was a wonderful scene where you never even see George's face, you just see the back of his head as he glares at a painting his wife's lover gave her. You can feel the hate.

I love how much he loved his wife... how we only ever really saw him smile when he was looking at her. I love how quickly he realized that her flirty demeanor that night at the party wasn't aimed at him. The only other time we get the slightest smirk of pleasure out of George is when he's saved UK and US intelligence and taken his rightful place again. Him walking up the steps in that pimp dark suit with his springing step is just magic. He looked years younger. Like a man well-kept and well-loved. Guh.

I think I loved best that little stagger near the end of the film. The end of his career, the end of his reputation as an honorable man, the end of the life of the one man he might have considered a friend, these things never elicited a real response. But abruptly seeing the woman he adored return to him nearly made him collapse. It's a glorious glimpse at how very much feeling George tamped down inside.

Lord, I could watch it again right now :)

Sorry for the ramble, but it's becoming one of my favorite films :)

[tmblue]

It's SUCH a richly dense film. This just goes to prove it. I remember bits about the stuff you mentioned with his wife, but I honestly don't recall most of the rest. It just makes me that much more excited to re-watch as soon as I have the opportunity.

It's like... you can feel how packed full it is, how much there is in layers you haven't surfaced. I knew, as I was watching it, that I would have to comb over it with a microscope later. That it might require months of th0ught and second...third...twentieth viewings to feel that I "got it," or at least got all of what it wanted you to know or to feel.

I love film like that. That's a serious rarity.

Thank you for sharing those details. It's honestly going to make it even better when I watch again :)

[napchic]

I would bore you to death with my insights if we could ever watch the film together. I'm awful. I get SO. EXCITE. :)

I think that repression thing is why I'm such a fan of period English drama. I love period Japanese, Chinese and Korean drama for the same repression, but I've (unfairly) decided that far eastern cinema dislikes a period love story with a happy ending :). I almost never see a period far eastern drama where the couple I ship don't end in tragedy. I still watch again and again... hoping one or both of them don't die, lol.

I have screamed, "Why do you hate happy love!" at several movies before. I'll admit that.

But. I digress.

I love period British and even modern British cinema because they tell stories of masterfully repressed emotion.

The wonderful thing about repressed emotion is that it's like coiled potential energy waiting... trembling with the strain of being held back... until it EXPLODES ALL OVER EVERYTHING.

guh.

love.

It's no wonder I tucked mulderscully into my heart so snuggly.

I have a type
of story
that is SO my type.
RHr is exactly that type.

That ACHING strain of glances and lingering, grazing touches that crackle up your arm and down your spine.

guh.

You have to see the 2005ish version of Pride and Prejudice, because there is a BRILLIANT moment that Mr. Darcy helps Elizabeth Bennet into a carriage with a blink of a hand lift, and he clenches the blood from his hand a flexes it like mad a moment later.

I melted into the theater seat.

It's nearly as telling as the moment he groans out that he's been bewitched by her in the pouring rain.

Guh.

And in Sense and Sensibility a decade earlier... Emma Thompson solidified my adoration with her bracing attempt at a faltering smile as she learns all her hopes with the man she secretly loves are dashed... and later... so much later... oh it's beautiful... a tiny crack of overwhelmingly good news breaks her in half and her heart just wails from the screen...

My GOD. I love British film.
*sighs so happily*