Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

The spy movie, for many, is the high-flying adventure epitomized by James Bond.  Bond shows up, grabs some gadgets from Q perhaps, goes off, blows some stuff up, beds at least one girl, makes some quips and saves the day.  The quip part, at least, has been tempered if not outright removed with the ascendency of Daniel Craig as a more serious 007, but the basic idea of Bond as a guy who gets things done in exciting ways is what draws the viewers back again and again, with fans discussing who the best Bond ever is (it's Sean Connery, though Craig comes close).

Real espionage, of course, would probably look very different.  It's quiet by nature.  The only time a good spy agency's actions would get out would be when it screwed up.  And this initial screw-up is what sets in motion the plot of 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  There's nothing remotely Bondish about Gary Oldman's George Smiley, who actually says very little and, though armed for a crucial scene, never even fires a gun.  In fact, guns play very little part in the action of this movie, which has a low body count even if you count one unfortunate bird that flies into a classroom.

Much has been made of Oldman's Oscar-winning performance, so I suppose I should add to the Greek chorus here.  My first exposure to Oldman was in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where he hammed it up as the title character.  Later there were the turns he had in both The Professional and The 5th Element.  All of these movies showed a big ham of an actor.  I might have written the guy off had I not noticed how much of a non-presence he took as Commissioner James Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies.  That is hardly an insult.  Oldman's Gordan is a quiet family man, not the kind to run around in padded armor to save the day but still willing to work just as hard and not to show off.  It makes sense that Gordon would be quiet, honest, hardworking, and dedicated to doing what was right (as seen when, in Batman Begins and he's still just a street cop, he refuses to take any bribe money like his partner, something that apparently he is alone in, and still insists he's not a snitch either so as to uphold both his personal integrity and his sticking to the cop code of keeping quiet on such matters).

Oldman's Smiley is much the same way.  I said in my previous entry that Moneyball is a movie often defined by silence.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy makes Moneyball look like your typical Michael Bay film by comparison.  Oldman's lead character doesn't even speak for the first fifteen or so minutes of the movie, and seems more intent to simply watch what is unfolding around him, to say nothing of letting other characters tell him what he needs to know.  He has one long monologue about halfway through, detailing his attempts to get a Soviet to defect only to have the man rebuff him, explaining that to Smiley the most dangerous man is the true believer, and that's about it.  He has conversations, but generally says less than everybody else in the room.  Add to this that the viewer (and other characters) rarely know what's going on inside that man's head.  Fortunately, Smiley isn't a cold man.  He seems to be genuinely delighted to be figuring things out as he goes along.

This comes in handy.  The movie begins with Mark Strong (in what seems to be a rare good guy role) as a British spy, going to meet with a potential defector in Hungary, when something goes wrong and he appears to be shot.  His boss, John Hurt's "Control", is out due to some politicking and he's taking the silent Smiley with him (which seems to please everyone left behind).  A year or so later, after Control has died, Smiley is quietly brought back in to figure out which of the men just under Control (which included Smiley himself) is a secret mole working for the Soviets.  Since he'd been gone for so long, Smiley is not only the perfect man to look into things, he's also the only one of the group that is known to be innocent.

Besides Oldman, Hurt, and Strong, the movie does have a good number of familiar faces, many with very unfamiliar hair cuts, including Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds, and the BBC's Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch.  The net result is an excellent spy movie that doesn't revolve on brawn and gadgets but brains and observations, where the quietest man in the room may be the only key to figuring out what happened and who's to blame.