Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier Spy

There’s a para­dox at the heart of Tin­ker Tai­lor Sol­dier Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s ele­gant fol­low up to 2008’s Let the Right One In. In adapt­ing John le Carré’s 1974 espi­onage nov­el, the Swedish direc­tor has chanced his arm by eschew­ing con­tem­po­rary crime thriller trap­pings in the name of unmit­i­gat­ed authenticity.

He’s right to – the slow-burn­ing anti-Bourne plot com­mands it – but his loy­al­ty to le Carré’s bil­lowy prose will be lost on those con­di­tioned to coo along to the two-fist­ed testos­terone of Damon, Craig and Jase the Stath. But although it’s both anom­alous and out of fash­ion, Alfredson’s film is, by the same inti­ma­tion, a price­less antique set con­spic­u­ous­ly in a sea of noisy thrift-store clutter.

We open in Budapest where a bul­let trav­els through the back of MI6 offi­cer Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to the heart of the British SIS, tip­ping Con­trol (John Hurt) off his perch and forc­ing his clos­est ally, George Smi­ley (Gary Old­man), into retire­ment. But a tip off from an AWOL agent sees Smi­ley recalled to unearth a Sovi­et mole in the ranks. Pick­ing up where Con­trol left off, Smi­ley and wide-eyed upstart Peter Guil­lam (Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch) set about exhum­ing the Cir­cus’ most deeply buried skeletons.

Oldman’s pro­cliv­i­ty for play­ing vil­lains makes him some­thing of a sus­pect choice for the lead, but his abil­i­ty to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­vey hang­dog fragili­ty and silky sangfroid with noth­ing more than a creased brow is exact­ly what the char­ac­ter calls for. Smiley’s a man of few words and firm prin­ci­ple; uncon­di­tion­al­ly devot­ed to boost­ing Blighty over the Cold War hump.

His edge over the four prospec­tive defec­tors (Toby Jones, Col­in Firth, Cia­rán Hinds and David Den­cik) he’s been appoint­ed to col­lar is that he’s not out for per­son­al gain. Restor­ing the integri­ty of the insti­tu­tion he loves is ample moti­va­tion. The strength of Oldman’s turn car­ries with it the sink­ing after­thought that he has been wast­ed in recent years.

Tom Hardy, mean­while, gives the old hands a sprint for their shilling as Ric­ki Tarr, the mav­er­ick recruit whose return brings about the hunt for the dou­ble agent, but in truth it’s the con­cert­ed efforts of the afore­men­tioned sex­tet that makes Tin­ker, Tai­lor so com­pelling. This isn’t mere­ly an actors’ film, though. While Old­man and co com­pen­sate jar­gon-heavy but essen­tial expo­si­tion with deft­ly nuanced per­for­mances, it’s the grainy, sepia-tinged fin­ish applied to Alfredson’s metic­u­lous recre­ation of 1970s Lon­don by reg­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Hoyte Van Hoytema that you’ll wind up get­ting lost in.

While spy flicks have become pro­gres­sive­ly more super­fi­cial since the days of Three Days of the Con­dor and The Con­ver­sa­tion, Alfredson’s atmos­pher­ic and at times dev­as­tat­ing whis­per rev­els in the unglam­orous, aus­tere nature of covert lives. If his class was obscured from main­stream view before now, con­sid­er the secret out.