Secret Agent Man

Oldman shines in Cold War spy flick, Marilyn gets wasted and the Devil says ‘boo’

(Jan. 12, 2012) TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY. Like his 2008 film Let The Right One In, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is beautifully composed and photographed. Permeated with an air of impending doom, this film is fully realized and completely effective, if at times painfully slow.

Tinkeris adapted from the John le Carré novel, and the movie uses the author’s technique of building from a simple premise into complex, trans-continental cloak-and-daggery. It’s the early 1970s, the height of the Cold War, and tensions are running high in the spy community.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

GALLERY >

Gary Oldman has rightfully received glowing praise for his portrayal of the ironically named George Smiley, a journeyman spook left out in the cold after his boss got squeezed out of his command for botching an attempt to ferret out a Soviet mole within British intelligence. Smiley is tapped to take up the investigation from outside the agency.

Thanks to Alfredson’s talent for atmosphere, Oldman’s masterfully subtle performance, and an ensemble cast that serves as a “who’s who” of contemporary British cinema (Colin Firth, John Hurt, Mark Strong, Ciarán Hinds), we are quickly drawn into the violent, paranoid world of European Cold War espionage. On the one hand, Tinkeris a large-scale historical spy thriller. On the other, it’s an astutely observed character study of a singular man’s place in time.

As Smiley meticulously studies the Soviet mole’s maneuvers (and those of the Eastern bloc heavies backing him), we also get to see his personal world. His wife has left him, again, and without his work he would clearly be lost. He is a man defined by a job that’s founded on secrecy and distrust, in a conflict without clear boundaries or purpose.

By movie’s end, it seems there may be some hope left for George Smiley, but the heavy toll he has paid shows in the lines of his face and the way he draws labored breath. R. 128m. At the Minor.

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN is a tough nut to crack. It is an unfortunately light treatment of its subject, yet it contains some of the most watchable, entertaining performances in recent memory. As Marilyn Monroe, Michelle Williams is mesmerizing. She captures all the aspects of the starlet that made her so unique. She is an ungainly combination of sex and insecurity, insulated from reality by fistfuls of barbiturates and overpaid handlers, forever caught between playing Marilyn and figuring out how to be herself.

The movie is drawn from the diaries of Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a proper Eton lad with aspirations of working in the film business. He gets a shot as third assistant director when Sir Laurence Olivier (a very funny Kenneth Branagh) brings his circus to town, with Marilyn co-starring. The narrative gives almost equal time to the on- and off-set difficulties. Olivier, the consummate professional, is frustrated by Marilyn’s ongoing tardiness and insecurity. He is doubly plagued by the presence of her hard-hearted acting coach and molly-coddling business partner. Marilyn is shot through with self-doubt, intimidated to be working with the blustery stage star. Meanwhile her new marriage to playwright Arthur Miller is on shaky ground, and she and Colin start a breathless relationship.

1 2 3 4 NEXT PAGE >SHARE