This piece was written by Guest Reviewer Michael Sweeney.
The door opens and a wrinkled, seedy looking John Hurt glances nervously past your shoulder, looks at you suspiciously.
"You weren't followed." he says, glances again.
And thus you enter into a smoky, dark and quiet film that, in my youth, would have been called a "psychological thriller." Hurt is Control, the head of British spy agency MI5 and he is about to send a trusted young agent on a mission that will upend the entire British intelligence community.
This film has all the elements of intrigue, suspense and mystery that characterized the suspense and film noir genres of decades past. Missing are frantic chase scenes (eat your heart out, Jason Bourne), improbable feats of athleticism and spectacular explosions. And yet this film is gripping. There are many small, but rich, elements that deepen the experience and the characterizations - a bee in a car, an owl on fire (okay, you had to be there) and a meticulous attention to period details, to architecture, to style that underline and support the story and create an ambience that both establishes mood and believability.
As a measure of the quiet intensity of this film, the protagonist, George Smiley (Gary Oldman) has several scenes and probably eight minutes of screen time before he utters a single word of dialogue. There are meaningful glances, sidelong looks, shrugs, tiny nods and wistful smiles in place of what often passes for dialogue now.
I read the original novel by John le Carré years ago and I don't remember much of the story now so I don't have a lot of comparisons to make. But even without knowing the story, the film stays true not only to the genre of the cold war spy novel of the 70s and 80s, but to the dark, suspenseful Hitchcockian thriller and even pays a little homage to film noir's rainy black and white classics. It's a film that demands attention and doesn't do much hand holding although there is more than usual narration and explanation by a couple of characters to keep you up with the story.
Definitely worth a theatre trip. I'll give it a solid four stars.
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