Movie Review! Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
I took myself to the movies yesterday! It turns out that there's a bus that goes right from where I teach to one of my favorite movie theaters. I may have to take advantage of this more often. The movie I took myself to was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I've never read the book, but I do like a good spy thriller now and then.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is set in London in 1973, just past the pinnacle of the Cold War. It's set almost entirely within the ranks of MI6, England's answer to the CIA. This setting has a hell of a lot to say, just with visuals alone. The dominant color in this film is brownish-gray. Pollution and the lingering effects of the Blitz have colored London uniformly gray. Pasty white men with graying hair wear gray suits, relieved by the occasional fashion plate who wears brown. Interior walls are painted either industrial cream or wallpapered in what was once a delicate pastel and has since faded to brown. No one smiles. The sun almost never shines. The atmosphere is oppressive and claustrophobic. And these are the good guys. This is the West, the shining beacon of wealth and freedom bravely opposing the poverty-stricken, soul-crushing Communist East. Possibly the most delicately ironic moment of the whole film comes when Gary Oldman is sitting in a dark, dreary, ugly little living room telling Benedict Cumberbatch about his encounter with the great, unseen Big Bad of the movie.
Oldman, a British spy, had tried to persuade a minion of the Big Bad, a Russian spy, to defect to the West. On the surface, the minion had everything to gain -- money, freedom, art, joy -- and nothing to lose, as he faced the possibility of execution at home. Oldman gave him all the good reasons, and still the minion refused, getting on a plane to return to Russia and almost certain death. Why, Oldman wonders, did the minion refuse the life of free beauty that the West could offer? Cumberbatch doesn't answer, just sucks on a cigarette, but he doesn't have to say it out loud. The setting screams it for him: London of 1973 isn't really much different from Moscow of 1973. The spy vs. spy world these characters inhabit strips them of everything that makes life worth living, leaving them with nothing but abstract ideology. You can't help but feel a little sorry for them.
I don't know that I'd call this a spy thriller, exactly. It's about spies, spying on each other, but it's not very thrilling. There are a couple of scenes in which characters shoot at each other, a few scenes where other characters are tortured, and quite a lot of general skulduggery, but there's really only one moment that's surprising and shocking. Mostly, the film is slow. Glacially, academically slow. This presents something of a problem for the first act, in which the movie tries and fails to explain the plot to the audience. MI6 has had a personnel change, in which William Hurt and Gary Oldman have been forced into retirement and have been replaced by two other interchangeable muckety-mucks. Then an operation in Hungary goes wrong, resulting in the world's least engaging cafe shootout, and MI6 realizes that someone in the main cast must be a double agent. Hurt dies, and Oldman has been retired long enough, so it's probably not either of them. Therefore, Oldman is called out of retirement to find the mole, with Benedict Cumberbatch as his loyal aide. At stake are the lives of several of the UK's finer actors and various intelligence secrets that may or may not be sold to the Russians, the details of which are neither memorable nor important.
The first act drags horribly, taking far too long to deliver far too little information. There's a double agent who might be selling secrets to the Russians, all well and good, but beyond that? Who are all these people? Who are these white men in gray suits? I don't think we even learn everyone's name until at least halfway into the movie (which is why I will use the actors' names in this review; I'm fairly sure of those).
Once the plot has been introduced, the movie finds its feet a little bit. The second act has Gary Oldman investigating his former colleagues. Since this means that we begin to learn a little bit about them, it gives Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the grounding that it needs and begins to make some gestures toward creating characters that we can know and care about. We learn that Oldman's wife has been unfaithful, that Colin Firth was once suspiciously good buddies with Mark Strong, who was captured by the Russians and tortured until he revealed secrets, for which he was fired from MI6 and now supports himself by living in a trailer and teaching at a horrible boys' school. We learn that Tom Hardy fell in love with a beautiful Russian spy who wanted to defect, but could not prevent her from being captured before she could do so. And we learn that Benedict Cumberbatch has a lot of Repressed Feelings, which stem from three general sources:
1. Everyone treats him like a kid, although he's in his thirties and is ostensibly someone's boss (though no one, including his alleged subordinate, or the audience, takes that seriously).
2. He apparently has to walk into work every morning looking like he's just been assaulted by Callista Gingrich's hairdresser, who's given him an absolutely immobile, bulletproof hair helmet.
3. He's gay and has a live-in lover, while working for MI6 in 1973. We only discover this when he kicks the lover out, following Oldman's strongly worded hint, and it's another scene that says a lot about the way this movie operates. It comes completely out of nowhere, and it's the first hint that Cumberbatch even has a personal life, much less one that could be used against him. It causes him a great deal of pain to break up with the man he loves, and he breaks down crying once the guy leaves. Cumberbatch is a good actor, and you feel bad for him in this scene because of that, but he can't quite make up for the emotional distance of the past ninety minutes. The movie is so tight-lipped about its characters that they're still strangers to us long past the point where they should be. So you watch Benedict Cumberbatch crying over his lost lover, and it should be absolutely awful -- the man's just been forced to destroy the only bright spot in an otherwise grim life -- but it ends up being mostly just vaguely sad, a terrible tragedy happening to someone far away that you don't really know. You mourn more for the idea of what's just happened than for the actual people to whom it has happened.
And yet. There's just enough there, just enough of a spark of human warmth in all these people, that you don't want to give up on them. The interesting question is not "who is the mole?" It's "how will these stiff, brittle people react when something goes this terribly wrong in their world?" Who shatters, and when, and how? There's not a bad performance in the lot; within the narrow confines that they are given, all the actors manage to show that there's more to the characters than you can see on the screen. You can see the pressure of their lives and the broken remains left over once MI6 has wrung the charm and spontaneity out of them. You can see the desperation of men clinging to abstract political ideals because they're the only thing they have left. And by the time that the final murder is committed, you can totally understand why the victim accepts his fate calmly and without blinking; there's literally nothing left for him to live for.
It doesn't seem like it for the first act, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ends up being a good movie. It isn't really about story, and it's certainly not about characters, but it does unexpectedly well on atmosphere. The second act sucks you in as you look deeper into the stunted lives on display, and you see just enough that you find yourself wanting more, and the third act definitely picks up some steam as it grinds its way to its dark finale. I wouldn't call it a spy thriller, since it isn't actually very thrilling. I would call it a spy tragedy, in that it's about characters who are brought down by their own flaws. You spend a bit more than two hours immersed in the horrible environment that created and exacerbated those flaws, and you end up mourning for those men, who were probably never really kids, who were first created and then destroyed by the regime they serve.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is set in London in 1973, just past the pinnacle of the Cold War. It's set almost entirely within the ranks of MI6, England's answer to the CIA. This setting has a hell of a lot to say, just with visuals alone. The dominant color in this film is brownish-gray. Pollution and the lingering effects of the Blitz have colored London uniformly gray. Pasty white men with graying hair wear gray suits, relieved by the occasional fashion plate who wears brown. Interior walls are painted either industrial cream or wallpapered in what was once a delicate pastel and has since faded to brown. No one smiles. The sun almost never shines. The atmosphere is oppressive and claustrophobic. And these are the good guys. This is the West, the shining beacon of wealth and freedom bravely opposing the poverty-stricken, soul-crushing Communist East. Possibly the most delicately ironic moment of the whole film comes when Gary Oldman is sitting in a dark, dreary, ugly little living room telling Benedict Cumberbatch about his encounter with the great, unseen Big Bad of the movie.
Oldman, a British spy, had tried to persuade a minion of the Big Bad, a Russian spy, to defect to the West. On the surface, the minion had everything to gain -- money, freedom, art, joy -- and nothing to lose, as he faced the possibility of execution at home. Oldman gave him all the good reasons, and still the minion refused, getting on a plane to return to Russia and almost certain death. Why, Oldman wonders, did the minion refuse the life of free beauty that the West could offer? Cumberbatch doesn't answer, just sucks on a cigarette, but he doesn't have to say it out loud. The setting screams it for him: London of 1973 isn't really much different from Moscow of 1973. The spy vs. spy world these characters inhabit strips them of everything that makes life worth living, leaving them with nothing but abstract ideology. You can't help but feel a little sorry for them.
I don't know that I'd call this a spy thriller, exactly. It's about spies, spying on each other, but it's not very thrilling. There are a couple of scenes in which characters shoot at each other, a few scenes where other characters are tortured, and quite a lot of general skulduggery, but there's really only one moment that's surprising and shocking. Mostly, the film is slow. Glacially, academically slow. This presents something of a problem for the first act, in which the movie tries and fails to explain the plot to the audience. MI6 has had a personnel change, in which William Hurt and Gary Oldman have been forced into retirement and have been replaced by two other interchangeable muckety-mucks. Then an operation in Hungary goes wrong, resulting in the world's least engaging cafe shootout, and MI6 realizes that someone in the main cast must be a double agent. Hurt dies, and Oldman has been retired long enough, so it's probably not either of them. Therefore, Oldman is called out of retirement to find the mole, with Benedict Cumberbatch as his loyal aide. At stake are the lives of several of the UK's finer actors and various intelligence secrets that may or may not be sold to the Russians, the details of which are neither memorable nor important.
The first act drags horribly, taking far too long to deliver far too little information. There's a double agent who might be selling secrets to the Russians, all well and good, but beyond that? Who are all these people? Who are these white men in gray suits? I don't think we even learn everyone's name until at least halfway into the movie (which is why I will use the actors' names in this review; I'm fairly sure of those).
Once the plot has been introduced, the movie finds its feet a little bit. The second act has Gary Oldman investigating his former colleagues. Since this means that we begin to learn a little bit about them, it gives Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy the grounding that it needs and begins to make some gestures toward creating characters that we can know and care about. We learn that Oldman's wife has been unfaithful, that Colin Firth was once suspiciously good buddies with Mark Strong, who was captured by the Russians and tortured until he revealed secrets, for which he was fired from MI6 and now supports himself by living in a trailer and teaching at a horrible boys' school. We learn that Tom Hardy fell in love with a beautiful Russian spy who wanted to defect, but could not prevent her from being captured before she could do so. And we learn that Benedict Cumberbatch has a lot of Repressed Feelings, which stem from three general sources:
1. Everyone treats him like a kid, although he's in his thirties and is ostensibly someone's boss (though no one, including his alleged subordinate, or the audience, takes that seriously).
2. He apparently has to walk into work every morning looking like he's just been assaulted by Callista Gingrich's hairdresser, who's given him an absolutely immobile, bulletproof hair helmet.
3. He's gay and has a live-in lover, while working for MI6 in 1973. We only discover this when he kicks the lover out, following Oldman's strongly worded hint, and it's another scene that says a lot about the way this movie operates. It comes completely out of nowhere, and it's the first hint that Cumberbatch even has a personal life, much less one that could be used against him. It causes him a great deal of pain to break up with the man he loves, and he breaks down crying once the guy leaves. Cumberbatch is a good actor, and you feel bad for him in this scene because of that, but he can't quite make up for the emotional distance of the past ninety minutes. The movie is so tight-lipped about its characters that they're still strangers to us long past the point where they should be. So you watch Benedict Cumberbatch crying over his lost lover, and it should be absolutely awful -- the man's just been forced to destroy the only bright spot in an otherwise grim life -- but it ends up being mostly just vaguely sad, a terrible tragedy happening to someone far away that you don't really know. You mourn more for the idea of what's just happened than for the actual people to whom it has happened.
And yet. There's just enough there, just enough of a spark of human warmth in all these people, that you don't want to give up on them. The interesting question is not "who is the mole?" It's "how will these stiff, brittle people react when something goes this terribly wrong in their world?" Who shatters, and when, and how? There's not a bad performance in the lot; within the narrow confines that they are given, all the actors manage to show that there's more to the characters than you can see on the screen. You can see the pressure of their lives and the broken remains left over once MI6 has wrung the charm and spontaneity out of them. You can see the desperation of men clinging to abstract political ideals because they're the only thing they have left. And by the time that the final murder is committed, you can totally understand why the victim accepts his fate calmly and without blinking; there's literally nothing left for him to live for.
It doesn't seem like it for the first act, but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ends up being a good movie. It isn't really about story, and it's certainly not about characters, but it does unexpectedly well on atmosphere. The second act sucks you in as you look deeper into the stunted lives on display, and you see just enough that you find yourself wanting more, and the third act definitely picks up some steam as it grinds its way to its dark finale. I wouldn't call it a spy thriller, since it isn't actually very thrilling. I would call it a spy tragedy, in that it's about characters who are brought down by their own flaws. You spend a bit more than two hours immersed in the horrible environment that created and exacerbated those flaws, and you end up mourning for those men, who were probably never really kids, who were first created and then destroyed by the regime they serve.