Spycraft Dispensed With Appropriate, Deliberate Speed

By Mike Hale
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
October 22, 2011

“DO you know what’s killing Western democracy, George? Greed. And constipation. Moral, political, aesthetic. I hate America very deeply. The economic repression of the masses institutionalized.” 

A diatribe overheard at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests? No, think much earlier: a disenchanted British spy complaining about the state of the world in the late 1970s to his old colleague George Smiley in the much lauded television adaptation of John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.”

With a new feature film of that novel scheduled to open in December, starring Gary Oldman as Smiley and Colin Firth as the America hater Bill Haydon, there’s still time to discover or revisit the 1979 TV version, which came out five years after the book. (Acorn Media is rereleasing the three-disc, 324-minute DVD set on Tuesday, with a list price of $49.99.)

Those too young to remember the post-Watergate years can get from the mini-series a flavor of the gloom and alienation that hung in the air on both sides of the Atlantic; in his review of the novel, Anatole Broyard of The New York Times wrote that no sociologist “has succeeded so well in dramatizing the sense of doom that pervades contemporary politics.”

The cynicism of Mr. le Carré’s spies has lost its power to shock over the intervening three decades. What may strike the first-time viewer of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” the most, especially if he has an image of it as a groundbreaking television production, is how slow moving and classically proportioned it is. Audiences used to the pace of the modern TV crime or espionage drama will need to reorient themselves.

The director John Irvin and the screenwriter Arthur Hopcraft did a lot of compressing and reordering to make Mr. le Carré’s complex 355-page novel about Smiley’s hunt for a mole at the highest levels of the British secret services work on screen. But the nearly five-and-a-half-hour running time of the mini-series still allowed for long, leisurely sequences demonstrating the mechanics of the spy trade.

The script preserves the novel’s back-and-forth-in-time structure, and Episode 2 begins with an uninterrupted half-hour flashback recalling the seduction of a Russian agent in Lisbon. It provides some necessary information (as well as the program’s only depiction of sex), but in dramatic terms it’s a complete digression, something that now would be covered in a quick montage or a few lines of dialogue.

Along with the deliberate speed comes a lack of physical action, reflecting Mr. le Carré’s emphasis on moral and political questions over suspense and derring-do. The mini-series begins with its one true action sequence (a canny decision by Hopcraft and Mr. Irvin); the next five hours are dominated by scenes of Smiley conferring with his small group of confidants and interviewing people who might be able to lead him toward the mole. A few scenes involving Smiley’s protégé, Guillam, pilfering information from headquarters stoke the tension, and the final confrontation with the villain involves guns and some running around. But even that scene is remarkably genteel by current standards.

The suspense-procedural style of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” with its echoes of “The Day of the Jackal” and the American conspiracy thrillers of the early 1970s, has continued to thrive in British television; notable examples include the mini-series “Edge of Darkness” (1985) and “State of Play” (2003), both remade as American feature films. There has been very little like it in American TV however. The closest recent comparisons, if only in terms of being quiet and slow, have been on the cable channel AMC: “Rubicon,” canceled after one season, and “The Killing,” which viewers appeared to lose patience with after a strong start.

Of course those shows didn’t have the ace in the hole that “Tinker, Tailor” did: the improbable presence of one of the 20th century’s great film actors, Alec Guinness, as Smiley.
It’s conventional wisdom that Guinness’s performance is a landmark in TV history, and you won’t get an argument here, though if you’re watching it for the first time, you may wonder at the start what all the fuss is about. But then you start to notice that Hopcraft’s dialogue tends to sound a bit starchy in the mouths of everyone but Smiley (even though the cast included top British stage and film actors like Ian Richardson, Ian Bannen and Michael Aldridge).

Early on, Smiley, who was the central character in five le Carré novels, passes along a lesson from his mentor: “Good intelligence work is gradual and rests on a kind of gentleness.” It’s an excellent description of how Guinness builds the character. Much of what we know about Smiley accumulates through his reactions to the lies and sad truths that he hears, in slight movements of the eyes and in his capacity for surprise, an analogue for the idealism, or perhaps just devotion to his craft, that drives him.

In a 2002 interview included in the DVD set Mr. le Carré famously said of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”: “If I were going to keep one filmed version of my work, this would be it.” At that point several fine film adaptations of his work had come out — directors like John Boorman (“The Tailor of Panama”) and Fred Schepisi (“The Russia House”) had improved on the original material — but Mr. le Carré can be forgiven for preferring the production that was most faithful to his own vision, and the actor who so expertly embodied his most famous creation.