The Shadows
Posts: 7
Joined: 10/5/2008
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quote:
Meh, cut and paste your review if you want it reading. While we're on your initial point though, and its one I've seen repeated elsewhere, but I have to disagree. My wife is a regular "punter", and she went along and paid her £7 yesterday and really enjoyed it. So yeah, some punters like it, some don't. Isn't that how it is with every film?
With respect to the point you raise, it is impossible to disagree. Of course, different people will have different opinions. I was merely reflecting on the critical consensus, which is less normal. You would expect some difference of opinion among the pros as well.
Please find my review, for your reading pleasure:
Spy Games
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a fabulously well made film. You cannot fault it for technical proficiency or period detail. It has a stellar cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones - French distributor Studio Canal has clearly spent top dollar on the sets, the cars and the clothes, and Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is still riding high on the wave of critical adoration that made his previous film, Let the Right One In, a crossover hit in 2008.
Maybe I didn't do the film any favours by literally reading the book this week.
Maybe it is unfair to compare the film with the television series, which is widely acknowledged as a classic of the format.
But...
and it is with a heavy heart that I say this, I was disappointed.
Probably I built it up too much in my head - the laudatory quotes and five star reviews on the poster certainly didn't help - but that is how I felt.
Trying to be fair, maybe I need to see it again. I was disappointed by the film version of V for Vendetta the first time I saw it, but now consider it to be an interesting and entertaining piece of work in it's own right.
So, where to begin?
The cast, which looks so good on paper, like a football team struggling for form, never quite 'gels'. While Gary Oldman is invisible inside the role of George Smiley (made famous by Alec Guinness ) - not for a moment do you think you are watching the same man who played Dracula, Sid Vicious or Drexl Spivey - some of the British 'made for TV' actors are harder to take seriously. Kathy Burke as love-starved spy madame, Connie Willis is particularly incongruous, but Sherlock Holmes, Ceasar, King George the Sixth and Trigger fair little better. Benedict Cumberbatch, who was terrific as Sherlock Holmes in Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat's modern day updating, doesn't seem to have the stomach to play Peter Guillam, the man who heads the Scalphunters. He is surely too fey and self regarding to marshal the troops amongst the meanest of all the MI6 divisions, the others of which are no shrinking violets, of course. Unlike the actors in the TV series, who were all clearly grown-ups, with the exception of Oldman and Hurt, the actors in this film come across like children playing dress up.
But boy do they know how to dress. Every haircut, every mini skirt, every courdroy trouser is recreated in painstaking period detail and (one assumes) accuracy. If only the kind of care and attention given to the popping of a Trebor mint in the mouth had been given to the script, which, all too often replaces Le Carre's evocative colloquial aphorisms with crude and banal explanation. It is perhaps a minor point, but I don't think there is a single swear word in Le Carre's 1974 book, nor in the BBC's 1977 TV series, so why the need to add them in now?
For the filmmakers, sex, violence and swearing all take precedence over ideology or ideas. What was sub text in the book and TV show is rendered as super text in the film. Characters all too often explain what they are thinking and how they feel, as opposed to letting the audience figure it out for themselves. In the TV series, the threat of violence said so much more than a throat hacked open or a disgorged corpse lying in a bath tub of it's own blood, entrails spilling out over it's legs.
The ironical and ultra-bright Oxford and Cambridge graduates who run London Station, as well as the field operatives who are trusted to undertake missions all over the world, are shown to be just as crass and inept as the man next door, which was certainly not the case in the book. Not to say that the characters in Le Carre's novel are incorruptible automatons. Far from it. Many of them were much more deeply damaged than those depicted in the film, but all of them were at least logical and clever people with misleading and contradictory motivations. Here, however, sensibilities are coarsened and subtleties ironed out, in order to make them more patelable for mainstream consumption.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is a European film with a European sensibility. Funded by the French, directed by a Swede, it never seems to take the idea of British Intelligence very seriously. There is no sense of context given to what are, on the surface at least, trivial matters. A more ambitious film might have started with some sort of newsreel footage, explaining that the Cold War was real, it was earnest and it was a very high stakes game. The ideological battle between the West on one side and the USSR on the other mattered because there was an absolute difference between the two. That is important. But one doesn't get the sense that the filmmakers really believe that, which is odd given the seriousness with which the director handled the fantastic subject of vampires in his previous film. Consequently, the sense of betrayal one felt when the identity of the mole was revealed in the book and the TV show is crucially absent from the film.
I went into this film with the best will in the world, anticipating something really great and wanting it to work for me too. But I came out feeling disappointed, even though the critical consensus tells me what I watched was a masterpiece.
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Printable Version
RE: RE: - 
. For the time being we'll agree to disagree but I would recommend a second viewing. I could definitely relax into it more because in an initial viewing I was slightly concerned for it in the mutations from the source material. I didn't have any such anxiety the second time.
Not rubbish by any means but a disappointment to me I just don`t get all the praise. Gary Oldman may well get an Oscer for his performance but ifso it`s only to make up for previous performances more deserving than this decent but hardly stunning impression of Alec Guiness talking posh and looking concerned for two hours. 
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