BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 20, 2011
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
“Homeland” ended its first series on December 18 in a ninety-minute episode, as if it had so many loose ends to tie up, and so much to deliver before “the event of the TV season” closed. A couple of months ago, I welcomed the suspense, the plotting, and the human interest of “Homeland,” but I wondered even then if the series would go crazy with its own narrative. That insanity or hysteria has to do with the ever more manic plot devices in a series that may be arguing over its own destiny while it’s still being made, and which is weighing dramatic choices against whether it will be renewed for a second season.
Two days before the last Sunday, I went to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the Tomas Alfredson movie in theatres, adapted from the John le Carré novel, but offered in the shadow of the 1979 television series that had Alec Guinness as George Smiley. The movie is riveting in the exact sense of the word: We feel nailed to the screen in the impossible task of working out what is going on—let alone why it matters. It’s a little deflating in the fatigue that greets the end of the movie to realize that the story is actually so slight: At MI5, the British “circus” for secret intelligence, there is a Soviet “mole.” We find out who it is. He is disposed of.
Can the praise going to the adapted screenplay (by the late Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan) be for that simplicity, or for the sleight-of-hand that turns the simplicity into a labyrinth, without ever suggesting why we should care? The movie is not prepared to be working for us, or on our behalf. Rather, it takes a supercilious pleasure in being difficult. Chess is often invoked in the course of Tinker Tailor as a model, and it’s a game played under a heavily muffled cloak with the occasional, bloody use of daggers, or guns. Every reviewer says how well the film is acted (by a lot of the usual suspects in English character acting), without coming clean: This is an actors’ exercise in which smothered glances, hushed words, and a stoic acceptance of nastiness assume that they are getting at the real thing—how spying was done in the good old days. I don’t believe it, and further I admire the anguished cry from one of the few interesting or appealing characters, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), that all he wants is to have a real life and stop being one of “You people”—the agents, controls, moles, foxes, and rabbits, whatever, who play the absurd game with such arid, elitist concentration.
This inbred cleverness frightens Tarr and it puts me off. Tinker Tailor is playing a game of keeping us attached while cultivating its own insolent mystery and mystification. The assets of the film go from the cast to the exceptionally dowdy production design (by Maria Djurkovic) and a rare ability to keep us in the dark that may catch the tone of British administration but which drains away the hope of emotional truth. It’s so mannered that being pushed an extra inch or two could easily lead to parody. Gary Oldman is impressive (though never as subtle as Guinness was) but he’s close to gaining entrance to the Monty Python club. So the human context of spying—as played out in the Philby case (and Philby is the model for our mole here)—is never touched upon. The stale, but self-admiring aura of a men’s club is underlined by their being so few women in the show. I heard people coming out of the theatre saying how clever it was to omit George Smiley’s wife, Anne, from the film. But is that cleverness or coldness, and an inadvertent way of explaining why Anne could not stand being with the wretched, neglectful George? He was an emotional mole long before he might have qualified technically.
In all its frenzy, the greatest virtue of “Homeland” was not its intrigue or the questions we wanted answered, but the women in the story and their relationships with the men. Its greatest insight was that the encompassing world of espionage was tailor-made for a brilliant, dangerously bipolar personality like Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), and few things I have seen on a screen lately have been better than Danes at the end of the penultimate episode, cracking up and being taken off to a hospital just as she grasped the inner workings of the terrorist plot that had driven her to her own brink.
Too many things were too hard to believe in the last episode, especially the way Brody’s mind was working—how he accepts the role of terrorist and is then talked down from it by his sixteen-year-old daughter while he’s being protected in some government bunker with many of the most important people in America, and wearing a bomb that could dispose of them all. The twists in Brody (played valiantly by his actor, Damian Lewis) weren’t just scriptwriters on too much coffee. They were the antics of a dramatic series thinking of being renewed. Everything about “Homeland” had to do with suspense and crisis: Something terrible is going to happen, or be narrowly averted. If it is a true narrative with interesting characters, those elements must be honored. They deserve closure. And the show was quite clear about the moral duplicities by which this America had earned a lesson and a rebuke. “Homeland” did a vey good job in saying that terrorists have a point of view—just as often in terror situations solution comes only when that point of view has been addressed.
But if “Homeland” is to carry on, and on (in the way that 24 did—and 24 is the hit behind this show, in terms of production personnel and the theme of mounting desperation at the heart of government) then we need the lead characters to come back. But in a narrative of a high order, attention must be paid to the lives and moral being of the characters, and in that sense Carrie and the extraordinary acting by Danes were hung out to dry. They can all be back for a second series, though, safe if not sound, but that much more compromised as real characters.
There’s a similar problem in Tinker Tailor. A kind of inner logic in the construct whispers, ‘suppose George Smiley is the mole’—Control says he could be, but we never credit that possibility. George is too central, and Oldman’s dry touches are overly respected by the film. If it is all just a game then that possibility should be in play. But Oldman’s Smiley remains a cipher of magisterial underplaying—and those two words don’t quite fit comfortably. By contrast, Claire Danes’ Carrie is unbearably credible, touching, and tragic, fiercely professional and desperately in love (if only Smiley could muster that). She is in agony while the men in the le Carré are just pretending life is gray and hard because those are the club rules.
David Thomson is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder.
16 comments
I haven't seen the movie, nor the Alec Guiness series (though I recently received it as a gift and plan to watch it over the holidays) ... but the book is the pinnacle of Le Carre's pre-Soviet-fall work. To write a review of the movie without a meaningful reference to the book feels like a disservice. That said, it has ensured that I will not see the movie.
- NR409654
December 20, 2011 at 8:44am
I haven't read the novel, but my sense is that part of Le Carre's point in these stories was how all of the "chess moves" and intrigue just didn't really matter too much. The movie conveys this sense -- it's all very insider-y and doesn't amount to much...and that's sort of the point. Admittedly, it can get a little tedious, but I enjoyed it. At the very least, it's a beautiful film to look at.
- josh_y
December 20, 2011 at 9:39am
The novel is partly about Smiley's relationship to his own history and the history of MI6, in many ways. Its power comes from the evocation of loyalty and memory (school is a running motif in TTSS). But I am astonished and dismayed to learn that Ann Smiley is not a character in this movie adaptation. Their marriage and what it does or doesn't offer is central to Smiley's character.
- ironyroad
December 20, 2011 at 12:22pm
Sorry to the commentators and the reviewer. I have read the book, its book sequel; and, I have seen both the Sir Alec Guinness’ first series and the sequel. The trouble with being old (as George Smiley should have said) is that you know too much. First of all the reviewers mis-identifies the principal institution at the heart of the two books and the film adaptations, its MI-6 that is the British Secret Intelligence Service; not MI-5 (as stated by Mr. Thomson). MI-5 is the British version of the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It serves as the United Kingdom's internal counter-intelligence and security agency. It is no more MI-6 than the FBI is the CIA.
- 12alainu
December 20, 2011 at 4:31pm
How could you have a film without Ann (Mrs. Smiley)? Ann is the woman who the Soviet Mole in the “Circus” (Gerald, i.e., Bill Hayden); is ordered (by his Soviet controller (Karla)) to start a public (i.e., know to everyone in MI-6 headquarters) extra-marital affair with; so that, should Smiley’s Mole suspicions fall upon him, no one will listen, because everybody will think that Smiley is just trying to sink the career of the man who is humiliating him, by publically having an affair with his wife. Ann’s bed is where the Mole is cooling his “d**k”, when a covert operation in search of the Mole (it’s “Operation Testify”; and, from where the book and the movie indirectly get their titles) blows up in the Czech Republic. And its Ann who indirectly confirms the Mole’s whereabouts during Operation Testify when she subsequently confirms to Smiley what he has discovered from other sources, mainly, that the suspected Mole’s foreknowledge of the failed operation could not have been gained from the wire-service teletype at his club, because he was called directly at Ann’s house by the MI-6 Operations Officer on-duty; and told only to urgently come into the Circus.
- 12alainu
December 20, 2011 at 5:06pm
12alainu, I really don't want this to degenerate into a Le Carre fanboy fight, but I am not sure we've read the same book, if your characterization is anything to go by: 1. The motives behind Karla asking Haydon to start an affair with Ann are far more complex than "no one will believe Smiley because you're publicly sleeping with his wife" ... it's about changing Smiley's perception of Haydon in such a way that he cannot see him for what he really is. 2. Smiley doesn't learn about the teletype mistake from Ann, he learns it from Sam Collins, the officer on duty. 3. Not sure what you mean by the origin of the title ... as far as I could gather from the book, it's based on a British children's game. Not being British, I don't know the details of it, but it goes something like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman ... or something like that. Sorry, as someone who's read the book a few times, I couldn't let it go ... I am the hugest fan of Le Carre's older work. He's one of the few authors I've read who can describe male emotions in a way I can identify.
- NR409654
December 20, 2011 at 5:26pm
As far as I'm concerned, Le Carre's original novel was difficult for the sake of difficulty and, perhaps, to hide the fact that the central plot of the story was mostly cribbed from the author's first novel CALL FOR THE DEAD. The film version apparently tries to stuff all of those pointless complications into two hours and becomes almost incomprehensible, while you could see most of them coming from three miles off in the television version, which at eight hours, was a way too long. (Clive James joked in one of his television columns about how the director, John Irving, devoted way to much time to "watching the light bounce off the singer's teeth.") The best film adaptation of a Le Carre novel was, in fact, the film of CALL FOR THE DEAD -- THE DEADLY AFFAIR, which had a smart, tight script by Paul Dehn, was well directed by Sidney Lumet, and was beautifully photographed and scored by,respectively, Freddie Young and Quincey Jones. Most importantly, it had wrenching performances from James Mason, Harriet Andersson, Maximillian Schell, and Simone Signoret. There was no sense in this movie of any games being played for games sake.
- lump516
December 20, 2011 at 6:35pm
I'll weigh in to praise one element of this article in a much more superficial way than the informative comments by others here: The film is deathly boring. I'm fascinated by the themes involved and impressed by the film's literary and cinematic pedigree. But is remarkably slow and stilted. I normally don't mind slow-moving films at all. And my tolerance for mediocre movies is even slower on a plane, where my standards are generally lower than anywhere else. But this is the first film in a very long time that I just couldn't bring myself to make it through during a flight.
- Thunderroad
December 20, 2011 at 7:12pm
I'd like to split the difference between 12alainu and NR409 (sounds like a Circus memo comparing the intelligence product of two sources!) and say that Bill Haydon does indeed call around to Ann Smiley to seduce her the night operation 'Testify' (but it's Czechoslovakia, not the Czech Republic) goes awry. He wants to try to rattle Smiley during his handling of the aftermath of the disaster, but I think the implication is also that it's part of a longer game leading to Haydon's promotion to a senior position within the new, vertical chain of command at the Circus. In the novel, Ann senses that he does not really desire her sexually and knows that some other, more suspect motive is at play. Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggarman Thief is indeed a riddle/game in which you count off from some random point and each kid in the circle then gets told what their future profession will be.
- ironyroad
December 20, 2011 at 7:50pm
Sorry if below comments are not responsive to other comments, written before I had a chance to finish my annoyingly long magnum opus. Anyway, maybe some more food for thought: Concerning TTSS, this review seems right on to me -- the movie is too dull and difficult to follow. The plot is needlessly befogged, the emotional stakes obscured, and the whole thing feels pointless. I'm a big fan of the miniseries (never read the book). It wasn't perfect, but Guiness *was* perfect, and the story felt more important and more interesting. It was very slow-moving -- way too slow, I think, for most audiences -- and so, when I heard about the movie, I welcomed the prospect of a lean, compelling feature-length adaptation that homed in on the suspense, the sentiment, the thematic content. As Thomson says, the story is not actually very complicated. Instead, the movie decides to emphasize the mechanics of the out-dated "tradecraft" and intrigue without even making those aspects clear, leaving the characters and their motivations out in the cold. The movie looks and sounds great, and the concluding shots, set to a bouncy period-correct version of La Mer, inserts some welcome irony and verve. But I fear that many audience members will arrive at those concluding moments not having understood what just happened, and not caring. Aside from look and tone, and a decent (though a bit mannered) performance from Oldman, the movie does just about everything wrong. The story is a whodunit -- who's the mole? -- which means that, in the proper Agatha Christie tradition, we need to get a good feel for our suspects, and it wouldn't hurt to actually suspect each of them at some point or other. This is a way to build at least superficial interest in the story -- to get us curious about the mystery. In this movie, we barely spend any time with the suspects, and one of the four -- Roy Bland, "Soldier," Ciaran Hinds -- doesn't register at all. The movie lays on the intricacies of the plot, but any joy to be had from such intricacies must come from actually understanding them. How many viewers missed the significance of "Witchcraft"? How many viewers failed to grasp the nature and magnitude of Karla's achievement, which was to brilliantly manipulate his adversaries' office and bedroom politics to essentially take over British foreign intelligence? How many viewers became confused toward the end, when the good guys put a plan into action to smoke out the mole, the details of which -- including a scene in which Ricky Tarr holds up some unidentified people in Paris -- go unexplained. TTSS has been praised for treating its audience like adults. But adults of even above-average intelligence cannot be expected to make inferences and deductions in real time without adequate information. *I* could follow it, but I was already familiar with the story. Speaking of office politics, this was one area among many where the miniseries excelled. We really got the sense that "The Circus" -- to use Le Carre's ironic coinage for MI6, then headquartered at Piccadilly Circus -- was undergoing a transition that honest worker bees the world over can recognize. That is, the institution was being taken from the competent and committed (and, I infer, liberal and therefore suspect), and handed over to ambitious (and conservative) hacks and morons. It's as though Dick Cheney's Team B is storming Langley and ironically leaving it more vulnerable than ever. It is precisely this transition that Karla manipulates and, in fact, seeks to bring about. We get some of that in the movie, which makes more clear than the miniseries that sucking up to the Americans is part of the moron agenda. But we're not made to care about it. In the miniseries, Smiley's victory over the forces of stupidity is sweet indeed. Here, it feels like an afterthought, goosed by the applause on that recording of La Mer as Smiley takes a seat at the head of the table. But were we spending any energy *rooting* for this outcome during the movie? I don't think the signals were strong enough to key in that sort of audience involvement. We were spending too much time just trying to get our bearings. The old guard's revenge and restoration is half the story's emotional payoff -- the comic half. The tragic half is more important, and handled here with even less dexterity. Why is Jim Prideaux shedding a tear and holding a rifle at the end? Did you miss why? You'd be forgiven for doing so -- the establishing moments are too fleeting and cryptic. As the director has said in interviews, the story is one of betrayal. I agree. So, you really need to feel the betrayal, which is personal as much as it is political. I have a feeling that many viewers probably didn't get the whole Prideaux thing, which is essential to understanding and appreciating that betrayal. Also essential is to get a decent sense for why the mole did what he did, even as we lack sympathy. We get a minute or two with him at the end. We come away from that minute, I think, not getting him at all. The whole movie ends up culminating in a limp exchange in which Smiley asserts his satisfyingly sotto voce bourgeois rectitude, of which we were already convinced, and the mole offers no compelling -- as in, dramatically compelling and credible -- counter. The miniseries didn't spend a large percentage of its run-time on this moment either, but the time it did spend was far more memorable. Lady Ann -- Smiley's routinely unfaithful aristocrat wife who is clearly out of his league -- is absent for almost the entire miniseries, but she *does* make an appearance at the end, to help explain the mole and take our brilliant hero down a peg. "Poor George," she says in a delicious line. "Life's such a puzzle to you, isn't it?" In the movie, she's just some faceless tart, as the Brits might have said. The relationship is not convincingly portrayed, in either film or miniseries, but the solution wasn't excision. The movie has been given credit for an added office party scene, which is said to have efficiently established the dynamics between the characters. It's too efficient. Wordless looks and glances across a room don't get the job done, at least not here. Thomson is right: By the end of the movie, I had a sense that audience reaction will run along the lines of: okay, that was some guy's literary, moody take on the world of British spies ages ago, which I, reasonably intelligent viewer, might have been persuaded to take an interest in, but, alas, was not this go around, having failed to understand what the hell was happening or why I should care. The spy world, though, isn't really the point. It's but a setting for the human drama. That understanding is why genre fiction like Le Carre's can transcend the genre, and a failure to keep an eye on that ball is why this fussy movie felt so tedious. As for "Homeland," I totally dug it. Claire Danes's character is the anti-Smiley in every way but brilliance. She's intense, profane, sexual, literally manic. She's no less credible than Smiley's trench-coat-clad bespectacled cliche. The show manages to make a decent case that she's more credible -- that a bi-polar blonde who alternates between yelling fits and crying fits and the valiant, pharmaceutical-aided effort to keep it together in between, is the fictional spymaster for our place and time. Le Carre is known for his pretty patois, which, I'm sure, like Ben Hecht vis-a-vis gangsters, he largely made up. Homeland's glossary consists of "fuck," "shit," "fucking shit," and "fuck," all of which, to my ear, elegantly capture the essence of the situation. Danes throws herself into the performance, and the breakdown that Thomson refers to is perversely thrilling -- as all good drama is -- for its raw, visceral emotion. Buttons are pushed, guts are wrenched. The series trades on the old idea that with the genius comes the crazy, but there's some truth to that. The other neat trick is to raise the prospect of sympathy for a terrorist. The Peacemakers (decent movie) tried something similar -- giving our bad guy good reasons and a puppy-dog face -- but the terrorist plot was too nasty. I'm as a big a TNR Idiot Watch guy as you'll find, but, I have to say, the plot here manages to muddle the moral issues for even a conventional viewer with conventional values. Let's just say, you really hate the vice-president. Not a new feeling for some of us. The series is not a masterpiece. At times, it feels fake. At times, it feels shlocky, especially in some early episodes. Some would argue that lovely bare breasts require no excuse, and they would certainly be right in the grand scheme, but there were times when the sex appeal felt like a network note -- not "organic," as they say. As for where the series left us, I didn't mind. Yes, they could have gone in a more hard-hitting direction. But I really did buy Damian Lewis in the crucial moments, and I want him back. Yes, they're setting up season two, but "fuck," I want season two! I want it right fucking now! Shit, Virgil!
- JakeH
December 20, 2011 at 9:45pm
Jake, you have to read the novel! And -- nitpickers to the barricades -- it's actually Cambridge Circus, not Piccadilly Circus (about half a mile away or so). But otherwise I agree on le Carré and the BBC's Tinker Tailor.
- ironyroad
December 20, 2011 at 11:05pm
Irony, thanks for the comment. What's with all these circuses anyway?!
- JakeH
December 21, 2011 at 10:27am
My wild guess is that circus and circle have the same origins in 15th/16th century English. Or something like that.
- ironyroad
December 21, 2011 at 12:16pm
Yes, you're right. Says Wikipedia: "First attested in English 14th century, the word circus derives from Latin 'circus,' which is the romanization of the Greek 'κίρκος' (kirkos), itself a metathesis of the Homeric Greek 'κρίκος' (krikos), meaning 'circle' or 'ring.'" Do you know whether MI6 was ever really headquartered there, or is the whole Circus thing an invention of Le Carre's? By the way, the building used in the recent film is awesome -- a beautiful old sprawling red brick structure with a giant courtyard in the middle housing a modern quasi-brutalist addition -- very credible as "The Circus." I wonder what that building actually is....
- JakeH
December 21, 2011 at 1:07pm
It's an invention of le Carré's, but very plausible in the sense that they could easily have occupied a building there. The M16 web site has a nice little slide-show on their various HQs over the years: https://www.sis.gov.uk/our-history/buildings.html The new headquarters building is a London landmark.
- ironyroad
December 21, 2011 at 1:39pm
What was Anne's history BEFORE Smiley? The reviewer has misread the relationship between Smiley and Anne and hence has no understanding of Smiley's values, love, devotion, and loyalties. Really... Smiley as "emotional mole" who caused Anne to wander? That's rich! Time order, please!
- w900mal
December 26, 2011 at 11:58am