On The Politics of an Old Nation's Foreskin: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

                I had planned to begin this blog again with a review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, because, without any doubt, it is my favourite film of the year 2011. I first watched it at Prasad IMAX, Hyderabad, my most preferred venue; towards the end of the screening, a member of the audience got up and shouted, not addressing anyone in particular, “picture kisi ko samajh mein aya” (did anybody understand what happened in the movie)? I was feeling what I presume to be the opposite of what the man in the cinema hall felt, but I have to admit that going by the general vibe of the audience, many were uncomfortable about the fact that there were strands and suggestions in the movie that are not easily decipherable: it screamed for a second viewing (and when was the last time you watched a spy thriller back to back, that too in a multiplex?). I, on the other hand, was feeling what a really good film does to me: suddenly I could feel this immense surge of energy inside which I did not know how to utilize. Here was a film that has reportedly grossed $ 17 million at the American domestic box-office alone, despite clearly being a film not mashed and pulverized enough to be processed by any below-average intellect at any stage of slumber, and that itself is enough to give us a high, isn’t it? And yet, I dithered, I hesitated; now, in hindsight, it might have been a simple unwillingness to part with the object of one’s love. But I waited for one specific reason. I realized quite early on that this film is a brilliant example of an adaptation. By that, I do not want to repeat the obvious and known fact that it is a movie adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (the comma-s were taken out of the film), but that the film is literary in a very modernist sense, and if one does not appreciate that, one does not even begin to comprehend the film.

                Generally, I do not read the literary source from which films come. By principle, I like to judge a film solely on the merit of what it shows and does not. Adaptation can be a good exercise to flex one’s analytic muscles for a film scholar, but for a film critic, they often act as unwanted sources of value-judgment that can a priori determine the outcome. It is a bit like being a Harry Potter fan: any bilge down the drain that stomps around carrying the holly banner gets an ear-splitting approval! But with Tinker, Tailor… I made an exception to this rule. Which was not really an exception, as I was not reading it because I needed to supplement my appreciation for the film or because they were needed to understand it; the film itself forced me to read the book, to experience it once again, under a different skin. This is a really rare phenomenon, and the last time it happened to me was at the very beginning of my film apprenticeship, at the tender age of sixteen, and the film was The Godfather (needless to mention, the book was inferior). Hence, I read the book. Then, I read the next two parts of the trilogy on trot. By now, I think I can safely say I have at least a beginner’s understanding of the intricate Smiley-Karla world so deftly and intricately populated by Le Carre’s details. Then, I watched the film again. It was even more electrifying than the first. In the meanwhile, two weeks have flown by.

                Thus, this piece comes already two weeks late. Now, I have a problem exactly the opposite of what has been called the ‘Beginner’s Dilemma’: I have so much and so many things to say that I do not know where to stop. Still, let is try.

                First of all Tinker Tailor is one of those very rare spy thrillers that you do not just need to understand, but feel. Today’s cinema rarely likes to demand from its viewers sustained attempts  at utilizing one’s critical and emotional faculties, and at best, emotions are only aroused when they can be controlled as a conditioned reflex: once the bell stops ringing, the dog stops salivating! On the other hand, the feel of this film can be quite depressing for the viewer longing for identification, easy cues for empathy, expectation etc. This is the first characteristic that makes this film stand out: it withholds obvious narrative clues, easy emotions, flimsy moralities. If you expect film to be like Pepsi or Horlicks, this isn’t it. This is a glass of very dry Chablis, and it demands the owner of the tongue to reciprocate the same sensitivity in kind.

                Secondly, the film uses the same sensitivity in the very look it produces. In one sense, this is a film about London, and not just any London, and especially not the London of tourism brochures. It is the gloomy and brooding London of the old Imperial “Great Game”, now bereft of its colonial glory, but still strutting imprudently into the thick of Cold War. This is a London of grey, brown and beige, and Alfredson, the director, eschews the seduction of cinematographic bravura quite comprehensively. In this age of tremendously mannerist film-making, such restraint is remarkable. The director, Tomas Alfredson, is Swedish, and he brings to the film and the film’s London the signature color palette of Scandinavian graphic designs, which, since Gurinder Chaddha, has become increasingly rare in British film-making. One of the scriptwriters of the film, Peter Straughan, has given us a glimpse into the directorial method of Alfredson here; he is found telling the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema the film should look like the “smell of wet tweed”, and he reaffirms it with the scriptwriter, whom he tells to write a script whose feel would replicate that of a “old man’s foreskin”!!  It is indeed a story of an old man’s nakedness, embarrassing in its brash posturing and petty little games of the aristocratic elites. That is really the crux of Le Carre’s novel, and it speaks volumes about Alfredson’s directorial precision that he managed to condense the whole spirit of the novel so poetically in those few words.

                Le Carre’s novel, the first installment of what is known as The Quest for Karla trilogy, painstakingly constructs the world of British Intelligence Service (mainly MI6) that has absolutely no similarities to Ian Fleming’s absurd glorification of the male chauvinist spy. Instead, it is a bureaucratic world per excellence, where all the exciting bits of detection happens in a department called “research”. In Le Carre’s world, no one glosses you about the typical code language of the bureaucracy; if you need to know what a “lamplighter” means, you need to read carefully and deduce on your own. And this ‘world’ that revolves around the headquarters called—very significantly—the “circus” and especially the fifth floor where the honchos sit (who are, by the way, called ‘owls’) is a microcosm of the British aristocracy, and the ‘great game’ is still played in the spirit of a Test Match at Lords in summer. There is a character in the novel (and in the film), Connie Sachs, who indeed calls the spies her “boys”. In the movie, Bill Haydon (played with an awesome, almost monstrous mastery by Colin Firth) and Peter Guillium (Benedict Cumberbach; yes, yes, the Sherlock Holmes guy. Don’t get your hopes too high; he is a side-kick here) come into the office on a bicycle and check out the new arrival in the office—a secretary of tender age and of the other sex—with a ceremonial pomp that is unmistakably British. And yet, all of these are happening in the festering air of cold war, and soon the happy delusion of the imperial game was to slip away forever. The head of the Circus, known only as Control—which is odd, since the only other person who is only known by a code-name is the arch-villain Karla—realizes that there is a ‘mole’, that is, a double-agent (the word ‘mole’ came into being with Le Carre’s work) inside the very top echelon of the Circus, but before he could intervene, something disastrous takes place, and there is a complete overhaul of power on the fifth floor. Control is thrown out, and so is his right-hand man George Smiley. Years later, and after Control’s death, Smiley is brought back to force the ‘mole’ out after fresh reports reach the ministry about the existence of the traitor. Without spoiling the tale and its suspense, I can tell you that by the time Smiley gets to this ‘mole’, every remaining trace of self-importance the Circus possessed was crushed. We so seldom realize that a cleansing is by rule more disastrous than an act of betrayal.

The Owls (notice the texture of the wall)

The novel was a reaction to a real event which actually forced Le Carre to give up his real-life career in espionage and become a full-time writer. Consequently, it is Le Carre’s most topical and political novel. What Le Carre really wants to demonstrate in the novel is the fact that everybody in the Circus knew somewhere deep down there who the traitor was, but refused to accept it. They refused to accept it, because to accept it would have entailed a complete and horrible demystification of the British imperial romanticism which remained the pleasant veneer under whose cover the dirty work was conducted. In other words, it is a not-very-subtle critique of British elite class; it is the closest Le Carre came to being a Marxist. However, the strength of the novel lies in the fact that it is not so clearly propagandist. In fact, the act of criticizing is the source of all the pain: the novel undermines precisely what permeates it, what is cherished by it, what creates the only lightness in this heavy material. The sentiment here was probably best expressed by Smiley’s wife Ann in the third book: “the one thing worse than change is status quo”. Only in fiction can you hold such contradiction in such a spoonful.

                The film does not try to achieve this ‘heavy-ness’ by importing large portions of texts from the book. That is Merchant-Ivory’s period pieces for you. In fact, in a film that has very little action, there is also startlingly little dialogue. The film does not try to import the novel’s contents, not even its ‘spirit’. What it does is to import its feel, its skin, so to say. Alfredson has the unfortunately rare gift of talking visually, and his does so with an understated grace that floors me every time I watch it. I suspect the script was built around a centre-piece, a monologue by George Smiley (played by the great Gary Oldman, who will most probably again lose the Best Actor Oscar to a totally undeserving candidate like Jean Dujardin) delivered to Peter Guillium. It is a monologue where Smiley looks directly at the camera, and tells the story of his only encounter with his arch-enemy, Karla. As the monologue progresses, Smiley shuttles between the role of Karla and himself to such an extent that the moral separation between the two sides of the war vanishes. If you are looking for some sort of ‘message’ in this film, that is the closest it comes to delivering one. I suspect it is not a very pleasant message for most. Every other scene is placed around this center like interlinking mosaic, but the connection between the fragments is stoically understated. And the modernist bit about the film and the book lies there. Le Carre creates a comprehensive parallel world whose realism matches that of the outer world, but this is not the world of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. You do not get an architect who will give you a convenient lecture about the nitty-gritty-s of the complexity. There is no easy psychologizing, no exposition involved here.  The master-plan is absent. You are literally thrown into this world, and you need to be as observant as Smiley to become a part of it. It is not as radical a world as that of James Joyce’s, but the impulse remains the same. And that is precisely why I feel it is extremely stupid to ask for a more ‘fleshed out’ narrative. The point of the film lies in what it does not show, and what it merely hints at.

                You must have noticed I have not uttered a word about the protagonist, George Smiley, here. I shall not, because it is the central task of the spectator in the film to find out who Smiley is. Not who is the invisible traitor, but who the visible man is. Watch his glasses; they reflect light back and hide his eyes like a spider. You will in all probability never see more vocal a pair of glasses ever in cinema. In one sense, this is a bildungsroman about Smiley, only put upside down. Notice how ironic the sudden burst of Julio Iglesias at the end of a movie that almost always refuses to use any extra-diegetic music is.

You will in all probability never see more vocal a pair of glasses ever in cinema

                However, the adaptation does make significant changes. Although a certain homo-erotic angle was already present in the book, the script punctuates it much more explicitly. The Circus is thus not merely the last vestige of a class delusion, but also teeming with men masquerading masculinity simply to survive—I presume—internal persecution. Isn’t the pain of that repression enough to turn one into a renegade? More importantly, the topicality of the original book, by now, is really redundant; hence, the film, as an adaptation, is more allegorical than topical. In one sense, the story is no longer about cold war at all, but the very world in which we live. Let that remain there, hanging in the air, to provoke your thoughts.

                Consequently, the Smiley of the film is much more brutal than the book. Some people pointed out their preference for the TV version starring Sir Alec Guinness. I personally found it to be too close to the book, and thus, too talkative. But more importantly, the Smiley of the film is a slightly different man, which might have a very different political significance to our times. Notice how he wins over the chair in the crown room of the Circus with background applause in the very last shot of the film. But his table is empty. He has cleansed it so thoroughly he is left with none. His triumphant look at the end thus attains a slightly delusional aura. This Smiley is much more disturbing than the original. And much more thought-provoking.

                It is always a pleasure to watch ensemble films with British cast; that nation, backed up by its formidable theatre traditions, produces great actors at a mass production rate. The same applies to this film also. The center-piece obviously is Gary Oldman, the greatest living actor who has not received an Oscar yet. Here, he acts stillness, one of the very difficult things to do onscreen, especially when you are there in almost 80% of the movie. But the most surprising part of the movie belongs to Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux. After his interminably long stint as comic book villains, here he finally manages to pocket and execute a role which does not have him hamming inconsolably. I hope this marks the arrival of a potentially great British actor. Colin Firth manages to empty his considerable charms enough to suggest a sickness, an anger, and an aggression covering up a hollowness inside. And then there is John Hurt, who no longer acts, but lends the absurdly aged crevices of his face to the physicality of the film.

                Tomas Alfredson is a serious contemporary auteur, and his two feature film—the other one being the awesome Let the Right One In—stands testimony to that. He does not belong to the now-antiquated art house-cinema crowd; and his auteur-ism has nothing to do with those large and apparently philosophical issues. He is more concerned with genres, and both his films signify significant contribution to their respective genres. I shall wait for his next, although he has already announced his retirement from film-making once, even before this film was conceptualized!

                Such brave films do not win Oscars. They are a little too difficult, a little too uncompromising. They have no message, nor are the favourites of some at-the-moment fashionable political group or cause. Instead, the Oscar will in all probability go to “The Artist”, the hollowest and sensationalist film to become big in a long, long time, and even if it does not win, the Best Actor will surely go to Jean Dujardin, who will be eligible for the honour for nothing but raw charm and a good set of teeth. I shall be glad if I am proven wrong, but in all probability, that will not happen. And let us be glad of such certainties. There will always be commercial films that are too dangerous for such conservatives like the Academy, and they shall remain in our memory, unaided, by their sheer excellence.

And I leave with this video of the Julio Iglesias song (what went wrong with the son, eh?). Enjoy.