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

i know what you mean nv about the "smartboy film" thing, but i think TTSS managed to be both ambiguous as well as having a tightly wound plot that does merit a bit of thought afterwards. it felt a bit like you end up assuming some of it rather than being beaten over the head with it.

some of the shifts are a little more elliptical than others. the setup of the final exposure/confrontation was pretty opaque to me. and i didn't get smiley's arrival at the boys' school -- tho i guess that information is gleaned from the files stolen by guillam.

i think the film leaves you to fill in the gaps, but also accept that some of the gaps are intended as unknowables, in the same way that the spy's world contains unknowables. i suppose it's not elliptical plots that bother me so much as circular earnest arguments about the "correct" solution.

the setup of the final exposure in the novel still feels a bit opaque to me and i re-read the fucker 3 or 4 times.

yeah i hate that kind of shit. i'm kind of anti-nolan solely because of it tbh

xp

yeah one of my big bugbears with Nolan is i think he invites that shit deliberately

donnie darko is the pinnacle of that shit.

yeah i have seen the miniseries and read the book twice each and just saw the movie i still dont really remember how the final trap works

i thought memento was a really unsatisfying exercise. i enjoyed inception somewhat but my first thought as the credits rolled was "i don't want to read a single thing about this shit on the internet"

anyway, no nolan in the lecarre room

smiley showing up at the boys school though--prideaux is still using his old "ellis" work identity. cant be hard to track it down.

the movie's explication is slightly clearer than the novel's i think. Smiley figures that the Russian cultural attache guy is the mole's handler and therefore by making the Russians think they've smoked out the mole they panic them into warning him - so the guy who turns up off-schedule to meet him must be the mole.

xp

yeah and iirc in the novel at least Smiley's aware that Prideaux isn't dead?

yeah in the novel prideaux comes back while smiley is still in the circus i think. the time frame in the movie is a bit confusing to me--seems to compress the novel into a much shorter span

novel version takes place maybe 6 months after Prideaux's capture? film version is much more ambiguous

having irina shot in front of prideaux confuses it for me. i thought prideaux had been released by the time ricky goes to portugal in the book, but i might be misremembering

anyway, and i probably said this after i watched it, but one of the most attractive aspects of the movie for me is that i didn't feel compelled to think the details thru. the dreamlike ambience was mostly great on its own, even more deliberately low-key than the novel. there are a couple of silly set-pieces that let that mood down i think. until i watch it again i'm gonna not think very highly of the "threatening to put Esterhase on the plane" scene

and the "Irina gets shot" scene was another bum note i think

the "threatening to put Esterhase on the plane" scene

i didn't really get what the threat was here. they were just gonna hand him over to the soviets? or put him in a place where he would probably get killed? or just demote him?

drop him back in Eastern Europe to get picked up by the enemy, yeah

i also feel like i missed some details about his backstory. was he hungarian, and a defector to begin with?

i think he's Hungarian and is "found" by Smiley in Vienna at the end of WWII but i don't think there's a suggestion that he's a defector as such. an emigre tho.

found by control i think. Smiley gets super mad at him for being a traitor (in the context of circus power struggle), right?

some of the details of his portrayal in the movie were much closer to the book than the miniseries' was -- flamboyant dresser, unplaceable accent

Speaks 14 languages, all of them awkwardly.

he's a bit Peter Lorre in the movie maybe but in a film of underdrawn characters that's ok. yeah really Smiley thinks of all of the suspects as betrayers of one kind or another.

ciaran hinds was a bit wasted. bland is an interesting character in the book, too.

i think it's probably a deliberate decision to have the characters so flat in the film but it's another thing that makes me question the screenplay a bit

On reflection, watching this film on a plane while sitting behind 2 screaming toddlers wasn't a great move in terms of following the finer plot points.

would have been nice to have bland et al fleshed out but tbf the decision to flesh out the central narrative at the expense of those touches probably needed making for a movie version

What's Bland's character in the book? I recall him as being the most underdrawn, as if the name was a hint. If it had been him as the mole I would have felt cheated.

I can only really remember him in one scene though, which is Guillam's trip into the Circus to steal the documents.

agree with ronan that this was not a difficult movie to follow, as long as you weren't looking sideways at it for the nolanswipe

in the book there's a pub lunch scene filling out his background a bit more, iirc- tho yeah he's less involved in the real-time plot than the others

bland is the working-class professor who uses his left-wing credentials as a way to recruit students in the eastern bloc

I'm starting to wonder which of you nerdz is the mole.

we all done it, guvnor

nah tho, for all it's fun to nerd out on the details i still think this is mostly a pretty meditation on emptiness and isolation and the horror of office jobs

ilx?

Man, the betrayal goes all the way to Smiley's conjugal bed

LOL, goole

i think goole may be onto something

noize board = scalphunters imo

pavement artists more like

a few interesting thoughts on the two adaptations:

There is another way the basic material has dated. Karla is considered a genius spymaster, smarter than anybody else in the business. Again, according to one Internet source (yes, I am getting into the epistemology of the Internet, but when better to do it than with the really epistemological world of intelligence gathering?), Karla was based on a specific Russian spymaster. Maybe so, but in the novel, miniseries, and film he is a superspy and infallible. The novel was written in the early '70s in the middle of the Cold War. The western spy services assumed the Soviet spy services were better than ours. We now know they weren’t. After the collapse of the Soviet regime, much, how shall we say, information in the KGB files found its way to the West, and boy, while we thought MI6 and the CIA were a bunch of cock-ups, the Soviets had them all beat. For example, for two years in World War II, the KGB was convinced that the Cambridge Five had to be British plants because the information they were getting was too good. So now we find it a bit hard to believe that “Karla” was all that great at his job. (A lot of information about this comes from a fascinating book I recently finished wading through called Defend the Realm: An Authorized History of MI5 by Christopher Andrews, the leading British historian of intelligence. A warning to you: it’s 850 pages and it is not a quick read.)

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2012/03/understanding-screenwriting-90-tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-the-adventures-of-tintin-contraband-and-more

Interesting reading. This is a good opportunity to show my love for this poster:

http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m0ihbeP1pP1qzdglao1_500.jpg

i think the paragraph before that is more otm:

We also do not get to know the five people in the Circus that Smiley and the late Control suspect of being the mole as well as we do in the miniseries, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The basic story of Tinker Tailor was inspired by the “Cambridge Five,” as their Russian spymasters called them. They had positions of varying degrees of power in various branches of British intelligence from the late '30s on, and the Brits only began to suspect something was up in the late '40s. Three of the Five defected to Moscow, two in the early '50s, one in the early '60s. At least one source on the Internet suggests that one of the Five had revealed to Moscow that David Cornwell was working for British intelligence. Cornwell left the intelligence service, took a pen name and began writing espionage novels as John le Carré. In the novel and miniseries of Tinker Tailer we get a lot of detail about the five suspects, and more discussion of why the traitor among them was seduced by Communism in the '30s. There is almost nothing of that in the film, and I suspect that is because at this late date the idea that smart men would have believed in Communism may not work for contemporary audiences.

not getting that context across was a bit of a misstep, along with the line about fanatics always 'concealing a hidden doubt' or whatever. movie's two biggest flaws are its conception of the smiley character (the movie humanizes him, but doesn't convince you that he's a human being - hes probably a replicant) and not fleshing out hayden enough. but i still think its a hell of a picture. mark strong is so good in it that i wish he'd get some more non-badguy roles

I agree -- Mark Strong was so good in this it made me sad that he is usually cast as the villain because he's capable of a lot more.

nnn. le carre doesn't really do a good job of realizing other belief systems than british bureaucracy.

also (important news for americans): the authorized history of mi5 was massively slated on release here, for exactly the reasons you'd expect an authorized history of a country's espionage service to be slated. though you wouldn't expect someone who'd write a phrase like " I still consider that one of the two or three best miniseries. Ever." to be smart enough to pick up on that. (also not realising that Bill Haydon's sexual orientation wasn't an invention of the filmmakers.)

yeah, the number of writers who are dense on/have forgotten the queer stuff is amazing.

did you see this, thom