Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
There is much to love about this film. The aesthetic, production design, and cast are unquestionably immaculate. There is a clear sense of place and country. The dread and paranoia seeps within you like a wet January wind from the film's first few minutes and does not leave you until the closing credits.
It is also deeply pleasurable: for as dry and quiet as its subject material is, it is hard not to smile at the prospect of Oldman and Cumberbatch doing spy things.
And yet, as a massive fan of le Carré and a strong fan of the book, having read it a few years prior, there's a shallowness to this script and to Oldman's portrayal of Smiley. It makes this almost feel like a music video meant to evoke the feelings of a Cold War thriller without the cerebral nature of one.
Part of this may be endemic to the source material. Tinker Tailor is a book about the flow of information between many, many people, and it's a tall task to convey the nuances and complexities of that within a two-hour runtime. One way this shows up is in the shallowness of the characters portrayed: only our viewpoint characters get any semblance of personality, and the extent of Colin Firth's script notes (which is no fault of his own) is "womanizer."
Another issue is that I think the director doesn't quite get the essence of Smiley. As much as I love Oldman, he portrays Smiley mostly as a cipher, which I think is a misunderstanding of the character's enduring strengths and weaknesses. You were meant to underestimate Smiley in the exact same way Bill Haydon does.
This film is not a bad way to spend two hours, but I don't think it does a great job adapting its source material, nor of being an interesting thriller in its own right. Le Carré's work is hard to adapt. The Night Manager too suffered, albeit in the opposite direction, resorting to gratuitous action sequences and melodrama to make up for lack of explicit dynamism.