Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
This was a film that had pretty tough expectations to match. With the first Alfredsson film I saw, Let The Right One In, sitting in my top-10, I put him into my top-20 directors lacking any other evidence. I had a sense about him as a director. It would have been rather embarrassing if this faltered in any major way. Thankfully, Alfredsson is up to the task here, with a cast of some of the very best actors from the British Isles along for the ride.
The main premise of the film, there's a mole in the intelligence service and it needs rooting out, is pretty rote. If it put its main focus on plot, it could easily become an uninspired mess of intrigue. While things remain a bit unclear, as one would expect, for the majority of the film, this isn't really a twisty thriller. The time is instead spent on building up all the characters involved. It is a film that is more about the relationships between men than about spying.
On one side of the ledger you've got Control (John Hurt) who has received information of a mole. He sends Jim (Mark Strong) to Hungary in an effort to sort this out, but things go very wrong, leading to the ouster of Control and George (Gary Oldman). George is pulled out of retirement to pursue the mole when additional information is revealed. He brings Peter (Benedict Cumberbatch, sadly without his Cumberstache) along with him for the task. On the other hand, you have the four men who now run the shop and are the four suspects, Percy (Toby Jones), Toby (David Dencik), Roy (Ciaran Hinds) and Bill (Colin Firth).
There are a few different interesting dynamics between characters, told through a set of flashbacks, craftily tied into the present either through interview or reminiscence. By keeping the story in the present at all times in this manner, it avoids becoming a mess of timelines to keep straight. The way these developments come together in the end is a real great bit of emotion in an otherwise fairly icy tale. If I have one complaint, it is that one of the four suspects seems notably overlooked compared to the others.
As much as I do like the character-based drama, the film could use a few more moments of higher tension. There is one primary spying set-piece where Peter has to go into the office to recover a crucial document that could help determine who to believe, it is one of the highlights of the film. The film does overdo it with its focus on mood; how many times do I really need to see George swim. That makes the pacing a bit slack at times and had one person in my theatre snoring loudly for at least half the film, annoying the rest of us. So while this lacks just a little to make it a truly great bit of entertainment, it is a supremely crafted film.
4/5