Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film)

Plot

In November 1973, "Control", head of British intelligence ("The Circus"), sends field agent Jim Prideaux to Budapest to meet a Hungarian general and potential defector, who has offered to identify a mole installed by Soviet spymaster Karla amongst the Circus' senior leadership. Prideaux realises the meeting is a trap, attempts to leave and is shot in the back. Control and his deputy, George Smiley, are forced to retire, and Control dies shortly after. Sir Percy Alleline becomes the new Chief, Bill Haydon his deputy, and Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase his lieutenants. In a flashback, we see that despite Control's and Smiley's suspicions, the four had begun handling a high-level Soviet source ("Operation Witchcraft"); Alleline later begins sharing Witchcraft intelligence with the Americans.

Alleline and Bland meet with Permanent Undersecretary Oliver Lacon, the senior civil servant responsible for the Circus, to discuss the ongoing cost of a secret safe house to meet the Witchcraft source. After the meeting, field agent Ricki Tarr, currently in hiding due to being connected to several deaths in Istanbul, telephones Lacon to inform him of a mole within the Circus. Aware that Control had a similar theory, Lacon asks Smiley to investigate. Smiley recruits Peter Guillam and retired Special Branch Inspector Mendel to assist him.

After setting up a base in the Hotel Islay, Smiley has Guillam steal personnel records and copies of the Circus' slush fund accounts. He discovers several Control loyalists were ousted after Prideaux's shooting, as well as a record of payment made to "Mr. Ellis", one of Prideaux's identities, after the shooting. In Oxford, Smiley interviews analyst Connie Sachs. Sachs had discovered evidence that Soviet cultural attaché Alexei Polyakov was actually a military officer, and suspected his true role was to run a mole in London; Alleline had scoffed at her findings and sacked her.

Back in London, Smiley discovers Tarr in his house. Tarr tells how he was assigned to trail Boris, a Soviet trade delegate in Istanbul who was offering to defect, but who he quickly guessed was actually KGB. After Tarr witnessed Boris assault his wife and fellow agent Irina, he and Irina began an affair. Irina offered to reveal the identity of a top-level mole in exchange for asylum in the UK. Hours after Tarr cabled London about the existence of a double agent, the local station chief was murdered and Irina abducted. Smiley sends Guillam to the Circus archive to steal the duty officer's logbook for the month Tarr contacted London. Guillam, who had been Tarr's boss, is unexpectedly brought before Circus leadership and told that Tarr, who has been detected in Paris, is a traitor who has been bribed by the Soviets. Guillam returns to Smiley's house and, discovering for the first time that Tarr is there, punches him, but Smiley finds that the logbook pages for the relevant night have been removed, supporting Tarr's story.

That night, Smiley recounts his only meeting with Karla to Guillam. While working under the name "Gerstmann" in 1955, Karla was captured and traded to the Soviet Union by the Americans. Believing he would likely be executed upon his return, Smiley travelled to Delhi to recruit him. However, his constant urging for Karla to think of his wife only revealed Smiley's weakness: his love for his wife, Ann. A chainsmoker, Karla listened silently, stole a lighter given to George by Ann, and returned to the Soviet Union.

Smiley contacts another sacked loyalist, former duty officer Jerry Westerby, who tells him of how Prideaux's shooting sent Control into shock. Hoping to find George, Westerby had telephoned Ann; Haydon then arrived and took charge. Guillam wonders how Haydon could have learned of the emergency, to which Smiley informs him that Haydon was having an affair with Ann. Smiley interviews Prideaux, who is working as a French teacher at a prep school. Prideaux explains that his Budapest mission was to identify the mole and relay one of five code-names to Control. Alleline was "Tinker", Haydon "Tailor", Bland "Soldier", Esterhase "Poorman", and Smiley "Beggarman". However, he was captured and tortured by the KGB, during which he witnessed Irina's execution. During his interrogation, Karla personally visited and asked how close Control was to identifying the mole before trading Prideaux back to the Circus.

Smiley realises that Witchcraft is actually a KGB ruse. The four Witchcraft lead officers believe Polyakov is trading sensitive Soviet military and political intelligence for trivial British material. In reality, Polyakov is trading false or insignificant intelligence and the mole is using the arrangement to leak substantive British intelligence. Smiley informs Lacon and the Minister that the true object of Witchcraft is to lure the CIA into sharing US intelligence, which the mole can then leak to Karla.

To draw out the mole, Smiley and Guillam send Tarr to the Paris Station to cable the Circus. To ensure his compliance, Smiley agrees to Tarr's request to trade the mole for Irina, despite knowing she is dead. Smiley and Guillam surprise Esterhase as he leaves the Circus and drive him to an airstrip where they threaten to deport him until he provides the address of the safe house. Smiley and Guillam wait at the safe house for the mole to alert Polyakov that Tarr is about to blow their cover. The mole is revealed to be Haydon, and Smiley arrests him at gunpoint.

The Circus holds Haydon at its training and debriefing facility, Sarratt. Smiley informs him he will be traded for British operatives held in the Soviet Union, and agrees to settle several of Haydon's sexual relationships with both women and men. Haydon informs him that Karla ordered him to seduce Ann to cloud Smiley's judgment. He also confirms that Prideaux, a long-time friend (and, it is hinted, lover), suspected Haydon was the mole and tipped him off before his Hungary mission. Haydon was able to inform Karla and prevent Prideaux from being killed by the KGB. Prideaux, however, blames Haydon for allowing his torture.

Prideaux infiltrates Sarratt with a hunting rifle and kills Haydon from a distance, shooting him in the cheek and watching as he collapses. Ann returns home, and Smiley returns to the Circus as its chief.

Cast

• Gary Oldman as George Smiley ("Beggarman")
• Colin Firth as Bill Haydon ("Tailor")
• Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr
• Mark Strong as Jim Prideaux
• Ciarán Hinds as Roy Bland ("Soldier")
• Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam
• David Dencik as Toby Esterhase ("Poorman")
• Stephen Graham as Jerry Westerby
• Simon McBurney as Oliver Lacon
• Toby Jones as Sir Percy Alleline ("Tinker")
• John Hurt as Control
• Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs
• Roger Lloyd-Pack as Mendel
• Svetlana Khodchenkova as Irina
• Konstantin Khabensky as Alexei Polyakov
• Christian McKay as Mackelvore
• Michael Sarne as Karla
• John le Carré as Christmas party guest
• Katrina Vasilieva as Ann Smiley
• Laura Carmichael as Sal
• Phillip Martin Brown as Tufty Thesinger
• William Haddock as Bill Roach
• Stuart Graham as The Minister

Production

Development

The project was initiated by Peter Morgan when he wrote a draft of the screenplay, which he offered to Working Title Films to produce. Morgan dropped out as the writer for personal reasons but still served as an executive producer. Following Morgan's departure as writer, Working Title hired Peter Straughan and Bridget O'Connor to redraft the script. Park Chan-wook considered directing the film, but ultimately turned it down. Tomas Alfredson was confirmed to direct on 9 July 2009. The production is his first English language film. The film was backed financially by France's StudioCanal and had a budget corresponding to $21 million. The film is dedicated to O'Connor, who died of cancer during production.

Casting

The director cast Gary Oldman in the role of George Smiley, and described the actor as having "a great face" and "the quiet intensity and intelligence that's needed". Many actors were connected to the other roles at various points, but only days before filming started, Oldman was still the only lead actor who officially had been contracted. David Thewlis was in talks for a role early on. Michael Fassbender was in talks at one point to star as Ricki Tarr, but the shooting schedule conflicted with his work on X-Men: First Class; Tom Hardy was cast instead. On 17 September 2010, Mark Strong was confirmed to have joined the cast. Jared Harris was cast but had to drop out because of scheduling conflicts with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows; he was replaced by Toby Jones. John le Carré appears in a cameo as a guest in a party scene.

Filming

Principal photography took place between 7 October and 22 December 2010. Most of the film was shot in London. Studio scenes were shot at Inglis Barracks, a former army barracks in Mill Hill. The Merlin safe house scenes were filmed at Empress Coach Works in Cambridge Heath. Some exterior scenes were filmed on Hampstead Heath and in Hampstead Ponds, where Smiley is shown swimming. Some exterior shots were filmed in Kensington Gore, and interior scenes were filmed in Queen Alexandra's House and the physics department of Imperial College London, all in South Kensington.

The production filmed in Budapest for five days. Exterior shots included scenes at Fisherman's Bastion. The café scene in which Jim Prideaux is shot was filmed in the interior hall of Párizsi Udvar Hotel. The events which take place in Czechoslovakia in the novel were moved to Hungary, because of the country's 20% rebate for film productions.

The production filmed in Istanbul for nine days, shortly before Christmas.

The production reunited Alfredson with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and editor Dino Jonsäter, with whom he had made his previous film Let the Right One In.

Post-production and music

The film took six months to edit. The final song in the film, Julio Iglesias' rendition of the French song "La Mer", set against a visual montage of various characters and subplots being resolved as Smiley strides into Circus headquarters to assume command, was chosen because it was something the team thought George Smiley would listen to when he was alone; Alfredson described the song as "everything that the world of MI6 isn't". A scene in which Smiley listens to the song was filmed, but eventually cut to avoid giving it too much significance.

Heard at a Circus office party, sung along to by the guests, is "The Second Best Secret Agent in the Whole Wide World", composed by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, and performed by Sammy Davis Jr., from the British spy spoof Licensed to Kill (1965). At the same office Christmas function, the Circus staff sing the official "State Anthem of the USSR", conducted by a figure dressed as Father Christmas but wearing a Lenin mask. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), an album featuring Alberto Iglesias's score, was released by Silva Screen Records on 14 October 2011.

Release and reception

The film premiered in competition at the 68th Venice International Film Festival on 5 September 2011. StudioCanal UK distributed the film in the United Kingdom, where it was released on 16 September 2011. The US rights were acquired by Universal Pictures, which owns Working Title, and they passed the rights to their subsidiary Focus Features. Focus planned to give the film a wide release in the United States on 9 December 2011 but pushed it to January 2012, when it was given an 800 screen release.

The film was released in France on 8 February 2012 under the title La Taupe (meaning "The Mole").

Critical response

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy received critical acclaim. Rotten Tomatoes reports an approval rating of 83% based on 229 reviews, with an average rating of 7.80/10. The site's critics' consensus states: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a dense puzzle of anxiety, paranoia, and espionage that director Tomas Alfredson pieces together with utmost skill." Metacritic calculated an average critic score of 85/100 based on 42 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Jonathan Romney of The Independent wrote, "The script is a brilliant feat of condensation and restructuring: writers Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O'Connor realise the novel is overtly about information and its flow, and reshape its daunting complexity to highlight that". David Gritten of The Daily Telegraph declared the film "a triumph" and gave it a five star rating, as did his colleague, Sukhdev Sandhu. Stateside, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "As Alfredson directs the expert script by Peter Straughan and Bridget O'Connor, the film emerges as a tale of loneliness and desperation among men who can never disclose their secret hearts, even to themselves. It's easily one of the year's best films." M. Enois Duarte of High-Def Digest also praised the film as a "brilliant display of drama, mystery and suspense, one which regards its audience with intelligence".

Writing in The Atlantic, le Carré admirer James Parker favourably contrasted Smiley with the James Bond franchise but found this Tinker Tailor adaptation "problematic" compared with the 1979 BBC mini-series. He wrote: "To strip down or minimalize le Carré, however, is to sacrifice the almost Tolkienesque grain and depth of his created world: the decades-long backstory, the lingo, the arcana, the liturgical repetitions of names and functions".

Keith Uhlich of Time Out New York named Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the fourth-best film of 2011, calling it "a visually stunning adaptation with a stellar cast." In 2020, Uhlich named it the ninth-best film of the 2010s.

Box office

The film topped the British box office chart for three consecutive weeks and earned $80,630,608 worldwide.

Awards and honours

Possible sequel

While doing press for Working Title's Les Misérables film adaptation, producer Eric Fellner stated that fellow producer Tim Bevan was working with writer Straughan and director Alfredson on developing a sequel to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Fellner did not specify whether or not the sequel would be based on The Honourable Schoolboy or Smiley's People, the two remaining Smiley novels in Le Carré's Karla trilogy. While doing press for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes in 2014, Oldman stated that talk of a sequel, an adaptation of Smiley's People, had since disappeared; while also stressing that he would still like to see the film produced. In July 2016, Oldman said that a sequel was in its early stages, stating, "There is a script, but I don't know when we will shoot." It was reported at the time that a script based on Smiley's People had been "greenlit" by Working Title Films.

In December 2021, Alfredson said that a film sequel to the 2011 film was unlikely; the rights having reverted to Le Carré's estate, who were planning to reboot Smiley on television. Alfredson expressed an interest in directing Oldman in a future TV miniseries adaptation of Smiley's People but he thought that the moment had likely passed. In an interview with the Radio Times in September 2024, producer Douglas Urbanski said that, "We loved Tinker and we started to do prep for Gary to do Smiley’s People, and suddenly there was an unexpected rights issue. We've reached out, including again recently, to Le Carré’s sons and — the damnedest thing — they have no interest in Gary playing Smiley again. I don’t know why." In March 2025, it was announced that a new TV adaptation of several Le Carré novels entitled A Legacy of Spies had begun production, effectively ending hope of a film sequel.

References

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