Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The time is the early 1970s, and deep inside the paranoid cocoon of Britain’s Cold War-era Secret Intelligence Service, the news of a mole inside the upper echelons of the agency is slowly corroding all sense of what is real and what is not. It’s a strong hook, and good thing, too—the first half-hour of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will likely appear incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the John Le Carre novel from which the film is adapted. This would be a dense narrative under any circumstances, but the early establishing scenes have a clipped feeling, as if the filmmakers had resolved to adapt every second chapter of the book and then hoped the details would somehow sort themselves out. Thankfully, they do, and Le Carre novices (like myself) will find themselves eventually forging the connections neglected by the filmmakers. Indeed, everything flows together gracefully enough that one begins to wonder if the early awkwardness was really due to clumsiness or was actually meant to evoke a sense of disorientation befitting this duplicitous world (a little of both, I suspect).

It helps to have such a deep lineup of talent on the cast—led by the esteemed Gary Oldman and his glasses—with fine character actors penetrating into even the smallest roles. This might seem like a strange compliment, but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy possesses one of the most homely casts I’ve seen in a mainstream film in recent memory, even with Colin Firth screwing up the bell curve. So many wizened, weary men, their worry lines slicing through their age lines, and then seemingly rubbed in an extra layer of dust and sadness—every face is a desiccated monument to a life of hard choices. The whole film echoes that sense of drabness, right down to the perpetually overcast skies and each dowdy detail of the production design (were the 1970s really this brown?). Director Tomas Alfredson could easily be accused of overindulging in the retro-chic, except that the style seems at least as important to the film’s purposes as its spy-counterspy machinations. As the mole notes, his betrayal “was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one.” A glib characterization of the Cold War, perhaps, but the film makes a case for it. The decaying western world is safeguarded by the moral compromises of its decaying protectors, and whatever you may call this sad sight, "pretty" is not likely a term that comes to mind. How else to rationalize the image of a balding, pasty middle-aged man dancing in paisley and ruffles? The loyal soldier commits many crimes in the name of war—against fashion, as much as anything else.

The King's Speech

God save the king? No, god save us from The King’s Speech, a harmless little trifle suddenly turned into a twelve-ton behemoth that sucks down awards with all the voraciousness of Godzilla during Tokyo rush hour. It’s all a matter of proportion, really—pet lizards can be cute, after all, but less so when they’re ten stories high with a co-ed’s leg stuck between their teeth. And that’s the problem with this film: its charms only work on a small scale. Focused on the stammering King George VI and his relationship with his speech therapist, the film finds an interesting way into the turmoil of the British ruling class during the 1920s and ‘30s. But the film inflates the importance of this humble story to absurd degrees, turning the speech impediment into a symbol of the king’s reluctance to rule and striving for an allegory of the sovereign finding his voice through befriending the common man (helpfully represented here by a speech therapist—just imagine what could have happened if the king had tried to befriend a cobbler or butcher).

Setting aside the dubious merits of democratic monarchism, this is still a deeply flawed dramatic approach. Meaning we get ludicrous scenes of people applauding and cheering the king’s address to the nation on the eve of war with Germany while the happy music plays, because that’s the logical climax of a story where the most important thing is that someone give a nice speech. Of course, I understand the need for dramatic license, but let’s not lose our heads here. You’d think the start of the Second World War might be a bit of a bummer, or at least a solemn occasion, no matter well enunciated. I mean, how excited can you get over a proper voiced bilabial plosive? Colin Firth may be good in this—his George is finely balanced between being a sympathetic man out of his depth and a spluttering, sheltered royal twit—but he’s still not good enough to stop me from laughing at the film when I shouldn’t. Such is the risk of acting bigger than you actually are. Even at the height of his power, we always knew Godzilla was just some schmuck in a foam suit too.

A Single Man

Is this a joke? The thought periodically flickered through my mind as I watched A Single Man. Fashion designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut is an immaculately serious character piece about George Falconer, a gay English professor in the early 1960s mourning the loss of his lover while carefully planning out what appears to be his suicide. And while I tell myself Ford must be taking this seriously, his excessive stylistic flourishes—pushing into realms of grotesque self-parody—give me cause to doubt.

The problem is that the film begs for a lighter touch. Instead, Ford smothers this slender, delicate story beneath a great red velvet curtain of ART, a crushing weight that grinds melancholy down into melodrama. Ford instills every moment with such gravity that absurdity is the inevitable outcome, even if not the original intent.

And perhaps the film could have worked as an over-the-top satire on repression and homophobia in the pre-sexual revolution era, except that the film bounces between poles of somberness and silliness without ever really settling on either. But my gut tells me Ford was going for something personal and heartfelt here, only to be sabotaged by his own childish giddiness at his new-found cinematic toys. For this story to achieve the grace it aspires to would require a subtlety and restraint not found in this world of garish close-ups, shifting colour palate, and slash-happy editing.

In the litany of bad choices made by this film, the burdensome, omnipresent score deserves special mention. Films unable draw out emotion through other means will often overuse music as a crutch for the deficiencies of performance and script, but in A Single Man, the inescapable, overwrought strings are less a crutch than a bat, beating the last bits of sincere emotion out of scenes.

The saving grace of the film is the performances. Despite some crying-in-the-rain excess early on, Colin Firth is actually quite good as George, particularly in the quieter moments, where a thin smile can say so much more than fiddling around with colour stocks. The film is at its best when the actors are allowed to play off each other, whenever Ford steps back from turning every gesture and look into a moment of unbearable sadness and simply lets the performances breathe. The simplest scenes are often the most nuanced and rewarding: George laughing and dancing with his old friend Charley (Julianne Moore, savouring every gin-soaked, bitchy moment with her character), or talking late at night with a young student (Nicholas Hoult), who reaches out to the lonely professor with a desperation that may or may not be sexual.

Such moments point to the modest yet tender and moving film this could have been—a film about the disappointments of life, about the addictiveness of loneliness and self-pity. But in this painfully arty film, style doesn’t extend the emotions buried in the story but instead substitutes for them, and rather pitifully at that. When George says he feels like he’s drowning, we know it because Ford has been smacking the audience in the face for the entire film with images of George adrift underwater. Never mind the risk of condescension inherent in such an obvious device—the sheer literalness of the image turns George’s despair into a quaint novelty. Ford treats the extreme emotions of the story with a mixture of overly pious respect and sarcastic dismissal. He seems not so much interested in exploring the depths of human experience as he is simply bemused that people feel anything at all.

But if we can't have a modest beauty, could we at least have a grand farce? Morbid humour appears in isolated moments like traces of a far livelier film long since smothered beneath lumbering self-importance. When George engages in an extended bit of comic business involving finding a comfortable position in which to blow his brains out—culminating bizarrely with him climbing inside a sleeping bag—the mordant wit jolts you out of the film. Weren’t we supposed to take all of this seriously just five minutes ago?

The film appears to be cutting down its own pretensions in such scenes, which makes it all the more unfortunate moments later when Ford dives back into his washed-out art-hell for another round of stylized moping. Ford should have handed direction of the film over to whatever part of his brain was responsible for such depravity as the fantasy cutaway where George, like a wayward, piddle-happy pup, pisses all over the neighbour’s obnoxious son. Whether or not the result would have been a better film is debatable, but at least it would have possessed some verve, some hint of vitality—instead of this elegant corpse we have in its place.