Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (novel, miniseries, and forthcoming film to be directed by Tomas Alfredson)

that whole section at the end (especially Peter's smile) is a bit shameless in it's attempt to please the audience but you know.. it's a 21st century movie not a seven hour 1970s BBC series or whatevs so i think we have to cut em some slack.

yeah out here in the 21st century we can't be expecting an audience to deal with a downbeat ending, cinemas wd be getting tore up

I read Smiley's satisfaction at sitting at the head of that table as drenched in irony

^ yeah, this. like: it's more a "now i am here and i have no idea if i wanted that" than a "now i am here, hooray!"; likewise ann's return is not actually a triumph for him, & it seems weird to read it thus

(justification in filmic terms - the latter is filmed in deep shadow from the head of the stairs, or something like; and the former ends with a fairly abrupt smash cut to black)

ha you guys are nuts, the ending is not remotely ironic, it's meant to be smiley totally kicking the door in

the former ends after he's exchanged a knowing smile with Guillam on his triumphal march to the top table, if Oldman's playing ambivalence at the end there then he fluffs it imo

i'll give you that "oh she's back" is dealt with a bit more subtly

yeah i think the (fluffed?) attempt at formal symmetry with the walk-of-shame at the beginning undercuts the ambivalence (i want to be) there -- still, though. i like it more my way.

justification of "now i am here and i have no idea if i wanted that" in mise-en-scene terms: given his known tastes in decor and etc (which we know from seeing the tasteful olden-times interiors of his house), he is sat in front of that screamingly 70s orange wallpaper, less swallowed and obscured (his favoured state) than horribly exposed <-- this is totally how alfredson's playing it

can't read how oldman's playing it ftb rubber guinness mask

"exchanged a knowing smile with Guillam" <-- cutting-edge sexuality alert

i like the way the film discarded some of le Carre's coyness about homosexuality but considering how underdrawn the suspects all were i'd question the screenwriters' priorities.

that screamingly 70s orange wallpaper

haha but er aren't those acoustic baffles? -- if he's in the office we see everyone arguing in throughout. (which itself is kind of a hint -- look at his triumph sitting by himself in a soundproofed room.)

look at his triumph sitting by himself in a soundproofed REALLY IMPORTANT BIG BOSS MAN room

i wanted the movie to be perfect too but sometimes you have to settle for good but flawed

ook at his triumph sitting by himself in a soundproofed REALLY IMPORTANT BIG MOLE MAN room <-- there is no dodging this

haha i think the film is very flawed: since i think its look is one of its -- and alfredson's -- strengths you should read with the grain first: wallpaper before "actors" so-called

tell you something tho, i am kind of psyched for them to go on and film The Honourable Schoolboy now assuming that a) the look will need to be totally different and b) Stephen Graham as Westerby will be about a million times more fun than Westerby as per the novel.

god except they'll move it from Hong Kong to Gdansk on a wet Tuesday afternoon or something.

ook at his triumph sitting by himself in a soundproofed REALLY IMPORTANT BIG MOLE MAN room <-- there is no dodging this

compromised it may be but that's cos it's the only room worth infiltrating <--- there is no dodging this

they should hire wong kar wai to film it

actually that is an awesome idea

not trying to talk myself out of how much i enjoyed TTSS btw but yes the art direction had to do an awful lot of the heavy lifting

xp

yet it's a fucking awesome idea

yet = yes

instead of taking off his guinness rubber-mask, oldman shd have donned a patrick stewart mask over the top

then get Woody Allen in for Smiley's People

otto leipzelig

the former ends after he's exchanged a knowing smile with Guillam on his triumphal march to the top table, if Oldman's playing ambivalence at the end there then he fluffs it imo

I wasn't suggesting Smiley found it a hollow victory - the irony, for me, was on the part of the director, who for the rest of the film hardly gives the impression that the only problem with the whole world they're in is that there's a mole.

yeah i mean i can see what you mean about the irony thing, but it was still out of step with the rest of the film. the whole feel of that last few mins wasn't really right for me, and if it was irony it was sort of oddly done.

It being a misstep, or a sop to commercial interests, are possibilities too. As is my misreading the rest of the film. But I prefer to have it all make sense my way!

the other bit in the last 10 mins that was shit was firth's "the west is decadent" or whatever he said. was like "ah let's give him a line to explain why he did it"...fucking scooby doo style.

that's from the book, and i suspect that by cutting back on the earlier presence of haydon as this amazing sardonic glamour-puss superspy that the entire circus adored admired and imitated they left themselves no way to open up the fact this his ideological "explanation" is meant to be seen as lame halting rubbish: the book's device has smiley only half-listening to the spew of cliche and not bothering to set most of it down on the page except as reported speech (viz the book's reading is that the mole likes being an actor with deadly secrets and the world at his fingertips; but the pretext behind it is just cobwebs and self-deluded empty blah: which is a shrewd IRL idea but needed way more work if they wanted it to read ironically, as opposed to just lamely)

yeah it was honestly not even a rant in the film, was just one single line. have to say i find colin firth pretty lightweight anyway but it wasn't his fault that bit was badly written.

prob sound harsh here but i loved the film, it looked great and the clothes and rooms and stuff were amazing, nice to see something really british too.

yeah like i said, underwritten characters all round imo. Le Carre is pretty good at establishing the suspects as, at least, separate personalities. Esterhase a lot less like Peter Lorre in the book.

s/b "a shrewd IRL idea that works in the book but needed way more work if the film wanted...": the book is kinda a detailed psychological exploration of the reality of a scoobydoo villain, and those round him -- which is odd but moving, actually

(not that JLC knows who the fuck scoobydoo is but i think a key to his success is basically treating quite trivial lightweight spy stuff as if it has enormous emotional-philosophical weight, like shakespeare rewriting the wacky races as a tragedy)

http://youtu.be/m6w0r-ScEG4

nice to see something really british too.

uh oh

what's that uh-oh for?

xposts

yeah le Carre manages to gloss over what we'd consider the heavyweight political and humanitarian stakes of the Cold War in favour of the emptiness and emotional damage it inflicts on a few players, and it's great. once again, the film isn't the book but attention to surface = less psychology = even less stakes, if anything.

Movie Smiley is kinda like the protagonist of The Third Policeman wandering around a murky, circular, mostly personal hell.

LG, just a dumb joke about your gray, declining isle and its cinema.

oh no DON'T

I found that explanation too Scooby-Doo at the time (seem to remember it being less so in the TV series). But afterwards, in my evident desire to rationalise this into the best film ever made or some such, I decided that its cursory nature was part of Alfredson's "look at these poor old fools carrying on in this bizarre foreign country of a past like what they're doing really matters" masterplan.

I think the world he used for the west was "ugly".

Dr Morbius believes Tinker Tailor is about the Irish secret service!

LG, just a dumb joke about your gray, declining isle and its cinema.

I'm Irish! I think the lack of good British films or TV is all the more reason to enjoy this. I guess it's sort of intangible as loads of British stuff hypes its own Britishness, but this actually had some of that feeling of 70s and 80s Brit TV to me.

Alba I like your take on it to a point for sure, I was going to say earlier I really liked the way the film handled the reveal about the Russians only using the UK to get at American intelligence too, it undermined the London operation even more and made them all seem like silly old men.

Silly old men being conned by an American escort agency.

it's a british subject obv but i don't think it's a very british film

This was probably no better or worse than Brighton Rock or Made in Dagenham (to name a cpl of other British films I happened to watch earlier this year). The latter is certainly v British in subject

i doubt i'd agree with that which is why i won't be finding out

just remembered there was a new version of Brighton Rock last year. was about to expostulate.

saw this last night. wonderfully shot - Smiley's hair at an angle to the bannisters! Circus away from Cambridge Circus as an insane

Had some issues. Characters felt totally without substance (didn't care who the mole was - rang his bicycle bell indoors pretty much, ok).

Not sure about the 'knew deep down' thing at the end. At the time considered a big part of novel was impossibility of knowing deep down, hence the difficulty of the task. otoh Smiley having to find a papertrail to the centre of his emotional life; I buy that.

Felt the crucial moment in the plot - the linking of Witchcraft with the Mole was undersold. Represented if I read rightly by the points touching the rail? Seemed symbolic but not realised. Without this the plot seemed a bit Get Tarr.

Smiley was the dandy, Hayden in his suedes felt comparatively shabby. This felt wrong.

Paintings felt wrong. like they were used for period detail (plus oblong Russification of setting?) in place of all the Corots etc. Can understand that was part of the aesthetic, but lost some of the sense of mole v smiley as intellectual/cultural fight. GS likes books, BH into high art. Not a loss at all really considering the look, but again dimmed the character conflict for me.

End was balls. Karla interrogation scene cheesey as hell, but neat idea to keep Karla as permanently absent. (non-existent?).

School excellent. Budapest excellent. Didn't feel as funny as TV series. Was thinking 'No fucking tension!' before the bag drop scene, but this was done brilliantly, tension v quickly established.

yeah the TV series is a Peter/George buddy movie by comparison. i missed those elements!

does smiley look like a dandy? he looks like someone who has v high professional standards of dress but gets all his suits from the same shop for no particular reason

i tried to watch the tv series last night but was informed i fell asleep three times during the first episode; i managed to dream an integrated scene where various of the potential mole types were having a chilli-eating competition and wake up without realising i'd been asleep, at one point, though on reflection it became apparent

i: this is the currently only ilx thread with the word "Tinker" in the title
ii: wasn't there a thread about when/where/whether ppl put tape across their doors to check whether their flatmates/parents were going through their stuff? What was it called?