Smiley & Smiley

We’re fans of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and were skeptical that anyone, even an actor as accomplished as Gary Oldman, could put his own mark on the main character, George Smiley. And how do you compress a seven hour (I think) miniseries into two hours without undermining motivation and creating serious plot-holes?

Nevertheless, the movie received some glowing reviews, so we’ve been looking forward to it. And looking forward to it. But this is Bakersfield, and I suppose Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is, what? Too much of an art film for this blue collar community? Very frustrating: we had to drive ninety minutes south to find a showing — at the Burbank AMC. And, wow, the “big city” (or perhaps I should say the suburb-of-big-city) movie experience has changed. We weren’t expecting to have trouble finding parking for a 9:40 PM showing. We came twenty minutes early, and only managed to get in line for tickets by 9:40. The line took ten minutes. There was even a line to give the guy our tickets, since he was checking folks’ IDs for the R-rated movies. We were sure we were going to miss the opening, but we didn’t count on them showing 20 minutes of trailers. And the theater was so crowded, Jake and I couldn’t even sit together.

Like I said, it’s a different experience . . . not at all like seeing a movie in Crescent City, or even Bakersfield, where we would have had the theater nearly to ourselves. But back to the movie. Here’s Smily & Smiley:

The good news: casting on the film was excellent. Colin Firth was a wonderful Bill Haydon, and I can’t imagine a better Control than John Hurt. The toad-faced actor who played Percy Alleline was great (Toby Jones, who played Karl Rove in the movie W), and accomplished what I had hoped more of the actors in this film would have accomplished: he brought a whole new angle to the role. Michael Aldridge (in the miniseries) seemed slow-witted, a conveniently gullible stooge, while Toby Jones’s Alleline is power-hungry and vindictive. Inner Circle member Roy Bland, a relatively minor character in the miniseries, shines with veteran actor Ciarán Hinds (Julius Caesar in Rome) in the role. He’s not given much to do, but he dominates his every scene.

And Smiley? I doubt anyone will ever top Alec Guinness’s depiction, which reportedly left an indelible mark even on Le Carre. The best anyone can do is not do a terrible job. Oldman is a believable Smiley, but Jake and I both had the same impression: My, doesn’t he do a fine Alec Guinness imitation? He brought nothing new to the role and he brought a whole lot less to it than did Guinness. With Guinness, there’s a wealth of sadness and disillusionment and cynicism. Very little of that came out in Oldman’s version.

The worst criticism, however, concerns the plot. This is a cerebral story. You don’t watch Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the gun play and car chases; you watch it for the acting and, well, the story. They’ve nailed the acting fairly well, but in the movie, they’ve glossed over too much to make the story convincing.

In the movie: How does Smiley track down Jim? Why does Toby flip so easily, with relatively little pressure from Smiley & company? Worst of all, how do they know for certain they’ve caught the right mole in the end?

Anyone watching this without past knowledge of the story (and an eidetic memory) will be lost.

I’m left to conclude that some stories are not meant for a two-hour format. You wouldn’t fit LOTR into a two-hour format, would you?

***

In other news, my word count is up to 25,000, and I’ll be writing more today, hopefully finishing Chapter 5.

D.

Walnut, January 8, 2012. Category: At the movies.

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