Don't Make a Scene: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Story: Another spy film, another style.  Last Sunday, it was James Bond.  This week, George Smiley from last year's extraordinary adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  The Bond's can change every time a new actor puts on the holster or when a new director takes over (November's Skyfall already looks to be decidedly different with Sam Mendes at the helm).  TTSS had the ghost of the multi-hour mini-series starring Alec Guinness (directed by John Irvin) to contend with.  When it was announced that Peter Morgan had done a draft for a new movie version of Tinker..., there were already raised eyebrows—John Le Carré's thick, intricate, character-driven book is immense and covers a lot of ground, internationally and over time.  How could one cram all that into a single film?

Director Tomas Alfredson managed to do it, and with scriptwriters Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor even managed to touch the highlights while adding a quiet depth to the characters, mostly without dialogue, and with a different style than mini-series and book.

Take this scene.  In the book, it's a description over dinner; the miniseries does it in flashback.  Not here.  The dialogue is mostly the same.  But the location and the way it's told is different.  The setting is Smiley's HQ for his investigation into double-agent treachery in Britain's secret service; the scene between Smiley and his "player on the other side," Karla, is described and mimed for the benefit of Peter Guillam, solely as a drunken reverie overlain with regret by Smiley.  It's haunting, peculiar and is much more effective than the earlier presentation.  There, Karla is very real, played silently and cynically by Patrick Stewart (before his career hit warp-speed) and is a fairly powerful presence, still with an air of inscrutability—an unknown quantity.

But in the film version, he's an empty chair, a memory, unseen (as he is throughout the film, his only sign of presence being the lighter that Smiley obsesses over, here—Karla's trophy from their earlier encounter that provides inside information for his plot to infiltrate "The Circus").  Unknowable, not even distinctive enough to remember (although one suspects Smiley may be obfuscating), he is a phantom, much more powerful in the not-knowing...and in his influence.