Whack-a-mole

The year is 1973, the milieu British secret service. Someone, we’re told, is a mole, a rotten apple—a red one. Retired master spook George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is charged with smoking him out. But how? Everyone has secrets. Everyone is compromised. Everyone looks a little shifty. The world, in fact, looks shifty. If you were to layer every frame of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy atop one another and shine a light through you’d get a palimpsest of grimy wallpaper, gloomy skies, nervous sweat, hairpieces and funeral parlour suits. Smiley’s bifocals rhyme with all those dirty windows, desk lamps and dull reflective surfaces of creaky old lifts with steel walls. You’d get a blur of European cities in multiple shades of shabby. This War isn’t just Cold; it’s also crepuscular, analogue and ramshackle.

Directed with a born voyeur’s gaze by Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) from a ruthlessly taut script by Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor, Tinker Tailor thrives on atmosphere. It needs to. Because of you haven’t read John Le Carré’s source novel or seen the original 1979 UK miniseries—shit, maybe even if you have—following the tangled threads of this adaptation, which clocks in at just over two hours but could easily have been six, can be a challenge. Smiley’s no great help here as he tends to say little. One of the things necessarily lost in this truncated narrative is a fuller sense of Smiley’s own psychic wounds. But there’s something to be said for this kind of bracing, at times baffling, concision. The film is claustrophobic and never less than intriguing. And the new emphasis on the characters’ sexual proclivities is quite welcome, and beautifully handled by the stellar cast, Colin Firth especially.

Which isn’t to say that we don’t get a few clichés thrown in. “Trust no one,” “Things aren’t always what they seem”: people actually say this stuff in Tinker Tailor. But the unsaid is often what’s most compelling in this morally murky, mystery-saturated thriller. Besides Oldman and Firth, the others actors who work wonders with misdirection and withholding include Toby Jones, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Ciarán Hinds and an especially pretty Tom Hardy—probably the year’s best gallery of guilt-ridden faces.

Out of the Cold, but far from out of the game: John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man

The titular figure of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man is as diminutive and weary-looking as the multitude of parties wanting him are immense and powerful. His name is Issa, a vagabond with “a look of winter,” a half-Russian, half-Chechen in his early 20s. He appears right there in the novel’s wonderful first line, emaciated and brooding, an unsanctioned tourist stalking Hamburg in a black overcoat that renders him only frailer and more conspicuous. He’s, by my measure at least, a rather hysterically devout Muslim, though his humourless, righteous, half-crazed demeanour may be partly the result of illness, perhaps partly of torture, not to mention the dark, grueling journey stowed somewhere in the belly of the ship that brought him to this not altogether friendly German port. There’s also the implication that Issa might be a terrorist. Whatever the case, his presence trips alarms all over. He means many things to many people, and he promises to prove useful in many ways, some of which the reader won’t likely be able to imagine before reaching this superb thriller’s final chapter.

In interviews le Carré has said that as a young man he invested institutions with the qualities he’d have liked to find in parents. It’s a rich observation, not only for what it tells us about le Carré—the institution he refers to being British intelligence, for whom he was once a bonafide spook—nor just the latent desire for authorities to whom we may submit, but for what it says about the persistent nature of patriarchy: in whichever form it takes, it seems ever the foil of the more worrisome heroes of fiction. And in le Carré’s milieu, there’s always reason to worry.

No less than three of the central characters in A Most Wanted Man, the three we can come closest to calling heroes, perform vital actions dictated by a troubling paternal legacy. Issa is the unhappy beneficiary of a tremendous sum left to him by a dead father he loathes. Brue, the affable, 60-year-old Scottish proprietor of a Hamburg bank, finds himself obliged to aid Issa due to the compromising legacy of his own father, whose business of financial management, both in its legitimate and crooked forms, Brue has carried on in his perfunctory fashion. Annabel, the young, idealistic, but very smart and more than capable activist lawyer who takes Issa’s case, struggles with the fact that for all her overt, deep-seated rebellion, she too has taken on the same vocation as her father, perhaps as a method of somehow doing good through the very same means her father used to do ill. These uneasy relationships to their respective dads is just about all these three really have in common, but, in le Carré’s inspired stratagem, it’s enough to tether their fates together.

Some claim the end of the Cold War left certain writers in limbo, le Carré most of all, seeing how the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold practically made the tangled web of Cold War intelligence his personal literary domain. But the novels that sprung up in the wake of what Francis Fukuyama zealously called the end of history followed their natural patterns, with le Carré turning his attention to multinational corporations, for one, in The Constant Gardener. That the war on terror should now loom over A Most Wanted Man comes as no surprise, and le Carré responds to its new world order with considerable vigor and insight, recognizing how the West’s current bogeyman might be seen as even more ubiquitous and unpredictable than the communists were, thus granting intelligence agencies tacit license to be still more ruthless. In a blackly humorous bit of anti-terror double-think, le Carré has one intelligence official explain to another how a terror suspect is that much more likely to be a jihadi for the very fact that he does not behave like a jihadi. And in a nice tip of the hat to his past work, le Carré sets this new tale in the same country that once marked the Cold War’s ideological frontier, and in the very city that was once home to Mohamed Atta.

As pessimistic as le Carré can be toward institutions, he remains, like his most notable forbearer Graham Greene, a true believer in individuals. Issa may be to the end a bit of a headache, an enigmatic centerpiece and all-purpose pawn too fanatical for the author to bother peering very deeply into, but le Carré is more than generous in his texturing of both Annabel, who for all her altruistic illusions is not condescended to, and Brue, who seems to be the character closest in spirit—as well as in age—to the author. “A lonely rich man in late life, still looking for the dignity of love” is how Annabel describes Brue, and the description is genuinely tender. It also starts to allude to the fundamental weaknesses of such essentially ordinary characters in the face of unfathomable power—for all our better intentions and beliefs, when our back’s against the wall, most of us simply do what we’re told. The world of A Most Wanted Man, controlled by the ostensibly diplomatic interests of at least three governments, each having very big fists, is not a forgiving one. It is harsh, and it thinks nothing of consuming lives to forward its goals. Which is to say that, Cold War be damned, this is still the world of spy fiction. “Don’t go soft on me,” one German operative warns another, “there’s no room for it in this operation.” “ Tell me one where there was,” slyly counters the other. There is, of course, no response to be had for that. And that, I’m guessing, is why we keep reading.

The Birth of the Cold

Peering out from below a broad, heavy brow, he has the pale face of a man thoroughly eaten up inside. The London he moves in looks damp, grey and bone-chilling. He wears his trench coat tucked up around him like a blanket, and puts away half a bottle of whiskey a day. He has no friends and speaks as little as he can get away with. He takes a menial clerical job at the library for the Candahar Institute for Psychical Research, where he works alongside a pretty, confident young woman. She explains to him what lycanthropy means in a weirdly sexy way that suggests he might just be some sort of werewolf, and she likes the idea. What matters, perhaps, is that he is so clearly someone other than he claims to be. It may just be the starkest romance in movies, and it really works.

But I’m jumping ahead. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1965) actually begins with Alec Leamas (Richard Burton) stalking Checkpoint Charlie, waiting for a man to cross over on a bicycle. A tense piano, Satie-esque, plays over the barbed wire, flood lights and brick. Things won’t go well. The photography is black and white, and this Berlin seems to have forgotten about things like trees—this is one Cold War movie that looks irredeemably cold. Leamas will soon be back in London, where he visits Control (Cyril Cusack) and takes a new assignment that will keep him “out in the cold,” pretending to defect in a ploy to turn one German intelligence agent against another. The brief period of work at the library was only meant as a fleeting ruse, but Leamas’ unexpected connection with Nan (Claire Bloom), who, in a tidy bit of dramatic irony, is a card-carrying communist, will complicate that. We know how these things go. It’s a spy movie, and thus perpetually mired in the forbidding causality that comes with the milieu: everything complicates everything. Everyone is a pawn of some sort.

John le Carré’s third novel, released two years previously, was a sensation, de-glamorizing the world of intelligence just as Bond was cashing in at the box office, yet so brimming with intrigue, brutality and human frailty, courting our appetite for dirty little secrets, that no one bothered to notice how wildly bleak it was. At least until they saw Martin Ritt’s movie of it, which failed to startle in the same way, though it earned Oscar nods. But The Spy Who Came In From the Cold is now available in a deluxe two-disc edition from Criterion. I just saw it for the first time, and what can I say? I’m startled. Ritt, who also made Hud (63), Hombre (67) and Norma Rae (79), may not have a reputation as a master stylist, or even a master of anything in particular, but here, in collaboration with cinematographer Oswald Morris, production designer Tambi Larsen and editor Anthony Harvey in particular, he produced something of marvelous texture and specificity. It’s transfixing.

Burton, whose Leamas now reads as part of the formula that gave birth to Daniel Craig’s Bond, may brood to excess for some—including, reportedly, Ritt—yet the character’s near-suicidal desperation, his immersion in his soul-crushing vocation, lies at the very heart of the story. And morose as Burton is, the overall gloom is greatly tempered by Bloom, so charming and smart, whose every nuance is so exactingly turned. She’s the sole woman in the movie, as well as the sole outsider to Leamas’ world, and she’s nearly its only source of warmth. Yet Oskar Werner, just a few years after Jules and Jim (62), plays Fiedler, a Jew in German intelligence with a massive grudge, and also possesses a certain air of inner life and excitement. And he also connects in his way with Leamas. Cusack, too, is wonderful, vampiric in his stillness, and so very English. So the cast inhabits rather than simply populates this world.

Ritt’s method of taking it all in includes a great deal of god’s eye views to heighten the alienation, balanced by two-shots that constantly emphasize the coded negotiations taking place in smallish rooms. The camera prowls, always. Lamps hang from chains in one location, from thorny antler-like mounts in another, all dangling with portent. There are beautifully timed fades to black, like the one near the start where Leamas sits with un-sipped tea in hand in Control’s office. Near the end there is a superb, ambiguously menacing exchange of gazes between Leamas and the ex-Nazi Mundt, and its after this exchange that we begin to understand how the whole narrative builds to a point of proving Nan’s ideological distinctions meaningless just as it completes Leamas’ moral perdition.

A highlight among Criterion’s supplements is a new interview with le Carré. He speaks very engagingly and has an endearingly refined way with gossip, stories about screenwriter Paul Dehn, who, matching le Carré’s own background as a British agent, was once a professional assassin; about various affairs between the collaborators and Liz Taylor's lurking in the background; about Ritt’s difficulties with Burton and how their antagonism might have been unconsciously nurtured by both of them so as to turn up the tension in the film. Le Carré also critiques the film quite soberly, and interestingly, believes that if anything it was too faithful to the source material. For myself, I couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like had the film started with Leamas taking his job at the library so that we initially knew nothing more about him than Nan does, and made our discoveries roughly in step with hers.