---
title: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)"
type: Movie
date: 2026-01-17
rating: 6
year: 2011
director: Tomas Alfredson
status: Finished
image: tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-2011.jpg
tags:
  - movie
colorSortKey: [0, 22, 0]
---
There is much to love about this film. The aesthetic, production design, and cast are unquestionably immaculate. There is a clear sense of place and country. The dread and paranoia seeps within you like a wet January wind from the film's first few minutes and does not leave you until the closing credits.

It is also deeply pleasurable: for as dry and quiet as its subject material is, it is hard not to smile at the prospect of Oldman and Cumberbatch doing spy things.

And yet, as a massive fan of le Carré and a strong fan of [[Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy|the book]], having read it a few years prior, there's a shallowness to this script and to Oldman's portrayal of Smiley. It makes this almost feel like a music video meant to evoke the feelings of a Cold War thriller without the cerebral nature of one.

Part of this may be endemic to the source material. Tinker Tailor is a book about the flow of information between many, many people, and it's a tall task to convey the nuances and complexities of that within a two-hour runtime. One way this shows up is in the shallowness of the characters portrayed: only our viewpoint characters get any semblance of personality, and the extent of Colin Firth's script notes (which is no fault of his own) is "womanizer."

Another issue is that I think the director doesn't quite get the essence of Smiley. As much as I love Oldman, he portrays Smiley mostly as a cipher, which I think is a misunderstanding of the character's enduring strengths and weaknesses. You were meant to _underestimate_ Smiley in the exact same way Bill Haydon does.

This film is not a bad way to spend two hours, but I don't think it does a great job adapting its source material, nor of being an interesting thriller in its own right. Le Carré's work is hard to adapt. [[The Night Manager]] too suffered, albeit in the opposite direction, resorting to gratuitous action sequences and melodrama to make up for lack of explicit dynamism.