Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, one of the best overall movies of the year, has as its counterpart the best blockbuster of the summer, X-Men: First Class. Separated by roughly a decade, both have as their subject the moral ambiguities of the Cold War, whether it’s expressed in the rot at MI-6 or the persistent ravages of the Holocaust. Both movies suggest that intelligence agencies lose by marginalizing the voices and original thinking of women in their midst. And both use tenderness between men, whether it’s explicitly sexual or not, to illustrate the costs of secret-keeping and the price of betrayal.
For the unfamiliar, John le Carre’s novel and the screen adaptations of it follow George Smiley (Gary Oldman), a dedicated spy and analyst, after his boss and mentor, Control, is disgraced and both leave the agency. In a fiendishly complicated series of events, Smiley returns to root out a mole who has penetrated MI-6—known as the Circus—and to claim Control’s chair from the people who have wrested it from him.
The men Control, and then Smiley, suspect of being the mole are played by a set of British actors so incomparable that the makers of ensemble dreck like New Year’s Eve would weep with shame if they had any upon seeing the roster. Colin Firth is the polished, charming Bill Haydon (who happens to be sleeping with Smiley’s faithless wife); Toby Jones is Percy Alleline, an ambitious climber Bill refers to at one point as “a poisonous dwarf”; David Dencik is Toby Esterhase, a refugee from the Iron Curtain; Ciaran Hands is tough Roy Bland. The team Smiley puts together to assist him includes damaged agent-runner Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch); violent and emotional scalp-hunter Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy); and intermittently disgraced Jerry Westerby (Stephen Graham) and Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke).
Even without the dispiriting quest for the mole, spycraft is, in this world, a rather grim enterprise. “All my boys. All my lovely boys,” reminisces Connie when George comes to visit her at the university where she’s nested after her expulsion from the Circus. “That was a good time.” “That was the war, Connie,” George reminds her. But even though there’s something sick about preferring a hot war to a cold one, Connie’s yearning for clarity makes a certain kind of sense. She’s tougher—and nuttier—than Rose Byrne’s oft-blown off secret agent in X-Men: First Class. “I don’t know about you, George,” she says when her guest arrives, “but I feel seriously under-fucked.” When Percy shuts down her investigation into Poliakof, the Russian cultural attache who is running the mole, it’s done less with the misunderstanding of First Class and with a more active malice. “You’re losing your sense of proportion,” he tells her. “Perhaps it’s time you moved into the real world.” It’s an expulsion from paradise with Percy as little tin God. Connie’s mourning a time when not only were the enemy and the tactics well-defined but when she was valuable and respected. (In a nice touch, we catch a glimpse of graffiti that reads “The Future Is Female” on a dingy London wall in the film’s climactic sequence.)
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