1-12-12 Movie Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Our local paper quoted the Los Angeles Times to the effect that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy “leaves us hanging by the barest skin of our teeth as we try to figure out who is doing what to whom and why,” and Entertainment Weekly said that “the first time you see [it], it makes your head hurt.” The woman I talked to in the lobby estimated that she understood less than half of it, her husband seemed to claim less that that, and I am not embarrassed to say that I was left in the fuzzy dark almost all the time.

But the individual scenes are totally believable, so the result is one of realism, and we wait with a certain amount of patience for everything to be revealed in the end – and I’m not saying to what degree that happens.


[Wichita showtimes]

The situation is not helped by the fact that this is one of those espionage tales in which everybody is involved in treacheries and conspiracies, and normal morality is not to be expected. Honest human relationships are distant memories if they ever existed at all, and precious little call is made upon our sympathies and we are not in a hurry to identify with anybody. I usually appreciate this kind of thing, but this time the lack of feeling of any progress being made pretty much wore me down.

The characters are not as colorful as the ones in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which shared many of the problems of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy but was much more sensational and had a quite original heroine; Tinker, Tailor has no heroine at all. But reviewers and even critics, a far more demanding group, are raving about it, and even Entertainment Weekly says that on second viewing, ‘it’s impossible not to be impressed by Peter Straughan and his late wife Bridget O’Connor’s sparse, labyrinthine script,” so apparently it does hold together on closer inspection.