Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy [Blu-ray]

Director: Tomas Alfredson Tomas Alfredson

Overview

Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson takes the helm for this adaptation of John Le Carr?'s novel about an ex-British agent who emerges from retirement to expose a mole in MI6. England, 1973: British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) head Control (John Hurt) and his top-ranking lieutenant George Smiley (Gary Oldman) are both forced into retirement after a mission involving respected secret agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) turns unexpectedly deadly. As the Cold War continues to escalate, suspicions of a Soviet double agent begin to grow within SIS. Subsequently summoned by Undersecretary Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney), Smiley is secretly reemployed by the SIS in order to root out the double agent suspected of sharing top-secret British intelligence with the Soviets. Meanwhile, as Smiley and his new partner Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) begin systematically examining all of the official missions and records involving MI6, the veteran spy can't help but recall an encounter he once had with Karla, a dangerous Russian operative, years prior. At first, uncovering the identity of the infiltrator seems nearly impossible. Smiley and Guillam get a big break, however, when undercover agent Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) reveals that he has fallen for a mysterious woman in Turkey named Irina (Svetlana Khodchenkova), who may have a crucial lead. Later, upon learning that Control had comprised a list of five possible suspects, code-named Tinker (Toby Jones), Tailor (Colin Firth), Soldier (Ciar?n Hinds), Poor Man (David Dencik), and Beggar Man -- none other than Smiley himself -- the investigation begins to heat up again.

Product Details

Release Date:	02/22/2022
UPC:	0738329257828
Original Release:	2011
Rating:	R
Source:	Kl Studio Classics
Language:	English
Time:	2:08:00
Sales rank:	22,826

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Colin Firth	Bill Haydon
Gary Oldman	George Smiley
Tom Hardy	Ricki Tarr
Mark Strong	Jim Prideaux
John Hurt	Control
Ciarán Hinds	Roy Bland
Simon McBurney	Oliver Lacon
Svetlana Khodchenkova	Irina
Benedict Cumberbatch	Peter Guillam
Toby Jones	Percy Alleline
David Dencik	Toby Esterhase
Kathy Burke	Connie Sachs
Stephen Graham	Jerry Westerby,Minister
Zoltán Mosci	Magyar
Arthur Nightingale	Bryant
Amanda Fairbank-Hynes	Belinda
Roger Lloyd-Pack	Mendel
Michael Sarne	Voice of Karla
Matyelok Gibbs	Mrs. Pope Graham
Philip Hill-Pearson	Norman
Jamie Thomas King	Kaspar
Konstantin Khabenskiy	Polyakov
Sarah-Jane Robinson	Mary Alleline
Katrina Vasilieva	Ann Smiley
Linda Marlowe	Mrs. McCraig
William Haddock	Bill Roach
Erskine Wylie	Spikeley
Philip Martin Brown	Tufty Thesinger
Tomasz Kowalski	Boris
Alexandra Salafranca	Turkish Mistress
Denis Khoroshko	Ivan
Oleg Dzhabrailov	Sergei
Gillian Steventon	Listening Woman
Nick Hopper	Janitor Alwyn
Laura Carmichael	Sal
Rupert Procter	Guillam's Boyfriend
John le Carré	Christmas Party Guest
Christian McKay	Mackelvore
Jean-Claude Jay	French Man at Residency
Tom Stuart	Ben
Péter Kálloy Molnár	Hungarian Waiter
Ilona Kassai	Woman in Window
Imre Csuja	KGB Agent
Peter O'Connor	Fawn
Alberto Iglesias	Composer

Technical Credits

Peter Straughan

Bridget O'Connor

Tomas Alfredson	Director
Peter Straughan	Screenwriter
Bridget O'Connor	Screenwriter
Tim Bevan	Producer
Robyn Slovo	Producer
Eric Fellner	Producer
Douglas Urbanski	Executive Producer,Producer
Olivier Courson	Executive Producer,Producer
Liza Chasin	Executive Producer,Producer
Ron Halpern	Executive Producer,Producer
Peter Morgan	Executive Producer
John le Carré	Executive Producer
Debra Hayward	Executive Producer,Producer
Jina Jay	Casting
Mikael Marcimain	Second Unit Director
Andy Bennett	Stunts
Mark Holt	Special Effects Supervisor
Libbie Barr	Script Supervisor
John Casali	Sound Mixer,Sound Effects
Nellie Burroughes	Stunts
Alexandra Ferguson	Producer
Artist W. Robinson	Producer
Alex Sutherland	Producer
Wolfgang Braun	Producer
Éric Heumann	Producer
Mark Appleby	Sound Effects
Howard Bargroff	Sound Effects
Orin Beaton	Sound Effects

Editorial Reviews

Director Tomas Alfredson's big-screen adaptation of John Le Carré's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974) constitutes the second filmization of the work, following an acclaimed 1979 miniseries starring Alec Guinness. Set in the early '70s, this version recasts Gary Oldman in the Guinness role, as George Smiley, a septuagenarian English spy called out of retirement to assist his former colleagues in ferreting out a Soviet "mole," rumored to have infiltrated the upper echelons of the British intelligence agency, referred to here as "the circus." Of all the ways to potentially fail in bringing its source author to the screen, Tinker avoids the most obvious and daunting pitfall: unlike, for instance, screenwriter Loring Mandel's abominable Le Carré adaptation The Little Drummer Girl (1984), it's entirely lucid. Le Carré owns a reputation for byzantine narratives with dozens of tangential subplots, and one can easily imagine a klutzy scribe trying to bring one of the author's sprawling novels to the screen and confounding the audience with minutiae. Not only does that not happen with the Alfredson film, the opposite can be said: scripters Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan (Mrs. Ratcliffe's Revolution) organize the material as carefully as a jeweler piecing together the gears of a pocket watch. The film is a marvel of narrative design: each scene falls perfectly into place, contributing a necessary piece of the exposition, and although we never once feel lost within the story, only at the end does the entire schema come into focus, with two revelatory scenes where we suddenly grasp the master structure. The film also nails Le Carré's tone: it received advance praise as an "exploration" of Iron Curtain-era ethics, but "evisceration" might be a more suitable word. These are sad, bitter, isolated characters, both riddled with paranoia and (especially in Smiley's case) drained of some vital emotional dimension -- and the film repeatedly and effectively drives home its conviction that a twisted Cold War rationale, shaped by transnational brinksmanship, second-guessing and doublespeak, made each of them this way. The movie's color scheme literalizes the sense of environmental causality, with many scenes shot in open air, and yet not a single instance of direct sunlight for over two hours. This may make the film sound deadening. It isn't, primarily because of the exhilaration derived from watching an entire ensemble of outstanding British character actors -- including John Hurt, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds and Colin Firth -- working at the top of their game. Oldman, as usual, is particularly superb: though given a lead character with severely limited emotional range, he succeeds at making Smiley both convincing and persuasive, and best of all, pulls off the challenge of bringing home a character at least 20 or 25 years older than he himself is. The film also gets a boost because Alfredson, Straughan and O'Connor manage to find an emotional center in a couple of moving subplots that branch off of the Smiley chronicle. One involves a young spy who rescues a battered wife from her slime-bucket husband, and inadvertently falls in love with her; the other concerns a homosexual relationship between two of the top British agents. In very different ways, the resolutions of both arcs each touch on the personal fallout and the inhuman cruelty inherent in the politics of personal relationships among Cold War operatives. And yet, paradoxically, herein also lie the film's problems. While the existence of such threads is commendable, they not only take a backseat but occupy far too little screen time, especially the story involving the two men. That one could be a real heartbreaker, and would likely provide a better springboard into an earnest look at the period's ethos than what is onscreen, were it placed closer to center stage. While one can fully understand why the screenwriters didn't do this -- they were obviously most concerned about getting the narrative logistics of the George Smiley story right, and making it comprehensible -- it doesn't change the fact that we feel a bit emotionally short-changed when the closing credits roll. In the final analysis, the movie's failure to explore its two most affecting substories at greater length is what holds it back from its full potential, and makes it merely very good in lieu of superb. And if nothing else, this -- when held up next to the unmitigated success of the Guinness miniseries -- may merely serve as a reflection on the fact that it's impossible to do complete justice to a Le Carré novel within two hours. But even taking its flaws into account, the Alfredson film is still the most successful big-screen transposition of its author since Sidney Lumet's The Deadly Affair (1967). As such, it merits a recommendation.