John Le Carré’s celebrated novel was, by all accounts, confusing enough as a seven part BBC TV series (starring Alec Guinness) but is doubly so when condensed into a two-hour movie.
For those, like me, who have never read the book, the burden of incomprehensibility threatens to remove any hope of enjoyment.
Who is the mole? Who’s telling the truth? Who can we trust? Why has Benedict ‘Sherlock’ Cumberbatch got such a stupid hair style?
These are a few of the many questions you will ask yourself in the course of this tale of betrayal and double-dealing.
The trick, I would suggest, is to relax and enjoy the stylish spectacle secure in the knowledge that a condensed story outline will be available at Wikipediia at the click of a mouse when it’s all over.
Swedish director, Tomas Alfredson, proves to be an inspired choice transferring the same level of shadowy mystery that he brought to his excellent vampire thriller , Let The Right One In. He teases out the essential Britishness of the story as perhaps only a non-Brit could and combines this with just the right amount of Kafkaesque detail. His job is made easier by a monumental cast which reads like a who’s who of the UK’s acting talent.
Gary Oldman is superb as the inscrutable George Smiley whose only hint of emotion comes when he sees his wife, Ann, fooling around with Colin Firth in the garden. This being a man’s man’s world, Ann remains as plot device we never get to meet in the flesh. The other women in the story get an equally raw deal.Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs is fired for displaying too much female intuition and Svetlana Khodchenkova as the lovely Irina is shot for knowing too much.
There are no James Bond style femme fatales, nor stagey villains -just an understated, engaging and confusing tale of cold war intrigue – just don’t ask me for a plot summary!
