Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Movie Review

Tinkering with a classic spy story: Oldman makes updated version as compelling as the original

December 16, 2011|By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Gary Oldman - in the role made famous by Sir Alec Guinness - stars as George… (JACK ENGLISH/studio canal )

***½

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson

Written by: Bridget O”Connor and Peter Straughan, based on the novel by John le Carre

Starring: Gary Oldman, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch,

At: Coolidge Corner, Kendall Square

Running time: 127 minutes

Rated: R (violence, some

sexuality/nudity, language)

The stillness of Gary Oldman in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’’ is magnificent to behold. We’re so used to star performances that announce themselves with twitches and tics, accents and earnestness, but what Oldman does as the British intelligence expert George Smiley is an acrobatic feat of minimalism. Smiley is the pasty-faced wonk of the crew running the Secret Intelligence Services, a.k.a. MI6, in the 1970s, and when the film opens, his career appears to be over. Along with his mentor, the Chairman (John Hurt), he has been forced into retirement. To add to the indignity, his wife is cheating on him with a smooth-talking co-worker. Smiley is done, finished, a used-up man.

Which makes him the perfect choice to investigate who among his colleagues is a double agent feeding information to Russia. When it was first published in 1974, John le Carre’s novel turned the spy genre on its head: Instead of Bond-ian derring-do, it went in for bureaucratic realism, a wrinkled nose for office politics, and a late-Cold War exhaustion that cloaked a higher moral imperative. It read like Graham Greene with the spiritual yearnings replaced by worldly conscience, and it had in Smiley a perfect hero for its times: disenchanted but not yet cynical and, above all, aware of the value of being underestimated.

Sir Alec Guinness played Smiley in a much-loved 1979 BBC miniseries, but Oldman and his director, Tomas Alfredson, reinvent the character for our own age of unease while keeping the story firmly in its time period. Alfredson directed the unsettling Swedish vampire movie “Let the Right One In’’ (the basis for last year’s Hollywood remake, “Let Me In’’) and his gift for understated storytelling continues to impress. “Tinker Tailor’’ moves forward in steady, incisive increments, and if you’re used to loud noises and jacked-up editing, the “Sherlock Holmes’’ sequel is that way. In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, “Tinker Tailor’’ is a movie for grown-ups.