COLIN FIRTH

TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER-A Review

by Matthew Harvey (edited for explicit content.)

So yes, well, this is amazing. One of the best films of the year, in fact. It’s like a thesp Expendables – in the first 15 minutes you catch a glimpse of pretty much every major British character actor you’ve ever heard of… Oldman, Firth, Hurt, Hardy, Mark Strong, Kathy Burke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Graham… If a bomb had gone off at the premiere, the UK film industry would’ve been literally f*#@!. Jeremy Irons would have to do everything.

Let the Right One In director, Thomas Alfredson, recreates perfectly the secretive corridors of power in 1970’s London – a damp and dreary world were everyone looks a bit like my dad. Gary Oldman takes on the iconic role of George Smiley, an intelligence analyst at MI6 or ‘The Circus’ as it’s euphemistically referred to. Following a disastrous operation in Hungary, he and his boss (John Hurt) are drummed out of the service into ignominious retirement. However, when a former field agent (Tom Hardy) reappears with information about a Soviet mole at the heart of the Circus, Smiley is drawn back into the spy game, tasked with finding out which of his former colleagues is betraying their country.

The performances from the extraordinary ensemble cast are, obviously, amazing. So much so that the Best Actor nominations at next year’s Oscars could conceivably be monopolized by this one film alone. I was particularly impressed by Toby Jones as Percy Alleline, the crafty and ambitious new head of The Circus whose effete ‘Posh Scottish’ accent I haven’t been able to get out of my head ever since. He never seems to get the credit he deserves, Toby Jones (maybe it’s because people get him confused with Toby Young) but having seen him play Truman Capote, Karl Rove and – to a lesser extent – Dobby, the annoying elf in the Harry Potter films, I’d argue he’s one of the most vocally talented British actors around.

John Hurt is also great, with that lovely old wrinkly face of his (when I’m a trillionaire, I’m going to have it pickled in a jar on my mantelpiece..) but best of all is Gary Oldman. His grey, bureaucratic spy is the opposite of the conventional Hollywood vision of a flash, James Bond-style secret agent. Needless to say, he doesn’t wear a Rolex with its own electromagnetic force field, or have skis that double as rocket launchers. He doesn’t even do any sh!@, sexually suggestive wordplay. Instead he mainly stands inscrutably still, sporting an ill-fitting suit and pallid grey raincoat – the uniform of choice for someone whose job it is to be instantly forgettable. Not that anyone’s likely to forget him anytime soon.

Source: profoundlymoving.com.
Matt is also on Twitter @matthewharvey