In a holiday season that’s seemed full of pretty pedestrian stuff, it was good to come across Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There’s real cinema value here.
The big thing I liked was the contrast-y image that was also desaturated. There aren’t any strong colors here; blues are flat, reds are flat and yellows are flat. Skin is ashen throughout, too, and the faces, particularly of the older characters, are heavily creased, in part because of the contrast in the film. Filmed with this look, offices are full of dirty, old clutter and dusty air, parties have a lifeless formality about them, and even Paris looks plain and drab. Tinker Tailor has this beautiful, consistent look throughout.
The look is a visual analog to the themes of this dark film, too. The good ole days of espionage are past at this point, and there is a significant leak in British intelligence. Like the offices full of faded souvenirs of past glories, the aging characters of the film have to trace back through their pasts for clues to today’s problems. And as blue isn’t really blue here, so are friends not really friends, patriots not really patriots, love isn’t love and glory isn’t glory. Tinker Tailor isn’t black and white at all; it’s a lot of empty tones telling the story of empty values.There’s continuity between the other film I know by director Tomas Alfredson, Let the Right One In and Tinker Tailor. They’re both visually muted, and they’re both about muted characters. The secondary characters in Let the Right One In remind me of the characters in this film – common, tawdry, mostly-good-intentioned-but-not-really-good people. Alfredson has done an excellent job of carrying the brown mood from Let the Right One In into Tinker Tailor, and the mood works great here.
And of course, John LeCarre’s book provides the story and characters. The story is long and somewhat complicated, but I credit Alfredson’s direction in keeping a lot of characters in front of us and still helping us to keep them all straight and follow what they’re doing. And Tinker Tailor would have clearly lagged did Alfredson not use such deft editing that we always only get the information we need without a lot of backfill.
It’s a bleak story. Lovers are split up, people who aren’t in love reunite, treason kills and deception reigns. But Tinker Tailor is as elegant a portrayal of exhaustion and decay as you’re going to see in a while.
