Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - 2 1/2 smiles

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” starring Gary Oldman, needs to be seen at least twice, especially if you’re not familiar with John le Carré’s spy novel. And even then you might not know what’s happening in director Tomas Alfredson’s densely plotted adaptation, which tends to be so hard to follow the first time around that you feel lucky that you can identify the characters. Nonetheless, Alfredson creates an atmospheric world full of effective locations filled with paranoid people who smoke a lot. In the early 1970s, Control (John Hurt), the head of ‘the Circus,’ le Carré’s nickname for the MI6 headquarters, calls agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to his home to tell him that there’s a KGB mole in their ranks. After Prideaux’s fact-finding mission to Budapest backfires, Control is ousted in disgrace. Months later, intending to investigate new reports that there’s a double agent in their midst, a civil service officer responsible for the Intelligence Services, enlists George Smiley (Gary Oldman) to investigate the organization from the outside. That’s essentially the plot except there’s Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), the rogue spy who has an affair with the wife of a Russian operative and gains important information. And Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), the junior agent whom Smiley enlists to smuggle key documents out of MI6 locked files. And then there’s the line up of potential moles that includes characters played by Colin Firth, Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones.

These secondary characters are sketched far too quickly with their back-stories summed up in a line or two of dialogue. To their credit, though, these exceptional actors make their time onscreen effective, especially Cumberbatch. Gary Oldman, perhaps better known for his on-going role as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, delivers a stellar performance as Smiley, a bookish, remote man who has spent a lifetime of seeing things no one should ever see. However, there are some things that that Alfredson throws in that make little sense. A prime example is a MI6 Christmas party with a Santa in a Lenin mask and the group singing, what sounds like, the Russian national anthem… in Russian, no less. Kinda makes you wonder why this was included when so much of the original narrative was excised. “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” certainly demands that you pay attention. It may even require you to see it again. 12/29/11, 1/8/12