Following the huge success of the 2011 film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – from the book of the same name by John le Carré – there was much talk of a second movie, based on le Carré’s 1979 novel Smiley’s People. The possibility was floated by Tinker Tailor cast member Gary Oldman in 2012 and then confirmed by him five years later, but then all went silent.
Until last week, when it was reported that any plans Oldman might have to return to the role had seemingly been – bafflingly – blocked by Le Carré’s sons. As the actor’s manager Douglas Urbanski revealed to the Radio Times: ‘We loved Tinker and we started to do prep for Gary to do Smiley’s People and suddenly there was an unexpected rights issue…. We’ve reached out, including again recently, to le Carré’s sons and – the damnedest thing – they have no interest in Gary playing Smiley again. I don’t know why.’
‘Why?’ is a good question. In the 2011 film, Oldman was a triumph. This was particularly remarkable given Alec Guinness’s unforgettable 1979 TV performance in the role, and its part in UK viewing folklore. While Guinness’s performance – a jug-eared, bowler-hatted, irascible cardinal – captured the character for a generation of TV viewers, Oldman’s Smiley – the shy, emotionally inhibited secret serviceman with wife trouble, ‘one of London’s meek who does not inherit the earth’ – was radically different. It was less robust, less openly proactive, and with a silence and stillness that make Guinness’s take look almost garrulous. Seeing the performances side by side, you realise that at this level ‘different’ doesn’t mean worse or better. But as le Carré pointed out, ‘with Oldman you share the pain more. I think you share the danger of life, the danger of being who Smiley is.’
Tomas Alfredson, the Stockholm-based director, captured that pain brilliantly, in a film which, for all its cold war subject matter, is a bit like the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ put onscreen. Alfredson seemed to have spotted the discomfort and despair, the loneliness, implicit in the TV series, and to have run with it. His portrait of the British Secret Service struggling on in a capsizing 1970s London – a dingy netherworld of clashing browns and smudges of desperate, garish orange – is one in which everyone is paranoid, every character seems to be holding in a private shame or grief. Even close colleagues put on an impenetrable front and play each other ruthlessly, trying (like West and East) to find ‘the weaknesses in each other’s systems.’ Betrayal and deception are rampant, conversations cautious and oblique. It’s a world of people who shun the daylight, unwilling to be seen or see too clearly, who can only really be themselves alone, in separate rooms, preferably with the lights turned down or the curtains shut against the world outside.
Sometimes Alfredson scores points the TV series doesn’t – his Secret Service Christmas Party, at which Father Christmas appears in a Lenin mask and the Circus staff, worse for wear, give a soused performance of the Soviet national anthem, is a masterstroke, and there’s a doomed love affair at the heart of the film you believe far more than in the TV equivalent (where Hywel Bennett, as the operative Ricki Tarr, is no match for Tom Hardy in the role). What Alfredson rams home is the perversity: that in its fear, dissembling and surveillance, life at the Circus is uncannily close to the totalitarian world they’re working to defeat.
All these elements come together in Oldman’s performance. As he goes about his search for the mole – identified as one of his close colleagues – he gives us a study of bleak middle age, haunted and chastened by past humiliations. Light on dialogue (it’s a full 16 minutes of screentime before Smiley speaks at all) it’s a performance that reveals, by the merest glance or change of expression, a deep inner life of regret, resignation, bewilderment, thoughtfulness – and compassion, one of this character’s defining features, kept rigidly in check.
The actor may have built a career on playing a series of extrovert and outlandish characters – Sid Vicious, Joe Orton, Beethoven, Lee Harvey Oswald, Winston Churchill – but Smiley, for his fans, was arguably Oldman’s greatest work. The spy’s introverted nature, Oldman admitted in an interview, was ‘closer to me,’ adding that it was ‘a joy to be asked to have an interior life that you express […] just through maybe the smallest gesture, a twitch of the eye.’ It was a pleasure to be asked just to ‘sit in a chair and listen, and to react.’ So understated is his Smiley, so much an ‘economy of energy’ (Oldman’s description of the spy himself) that the actor was frequently forced to ask director Tomas Alfredson if it was registering on the camera at all: ‘It is reading? Is it working?’
He needn’t have worried. Le Carré, speaking for many, said that Oldman, ‘even from the earliest rushes, was a man waiting patiently to explode. He had what painters call the “energy of the object”.’ When the character did combust – raising his voice just once in the movie or, in a flashback, as he witnesses a devastating personal betrayal, collapsing winded and gasping from the shock – it was all the more affecting for its rarity. ‘I love the movie, love your Smiley,’ LeleCarré wrote in an email to Oldman: ‘It’s a beautiful performance.’
Critics seemed to agree. In a five-star review in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw described the film as a ‘treat’ and an ‘unexpected thrill’, ‘anchored by Gary Oldman’s tragic mandarin.’ The New York Times described Oldman’s Smiley as ‘a fascinatingly gripping performance that doesn’t so much command the screen, dominating it with shouts and displays of obvious technique, as take it over incrementally.’ In a Telegraph review, David Gritten wrote: ‘We’ve never seen Oldman like this before, and he’s simply stunning,’ adding that one soliloquy of his was ‘so engrossing you forget to breathe.’ Oldman, Gritten concluded, was ‘easily [Guinness’s] equal’ in the role.
All of which makes the alleged decision by the late le Carré’s family even harder to believe. To say they are unlikely to find another actor able to inhabit their father’s creation so credibly, compellingly and so abundantly in line with le Carré’s conception of him is, you might say, an understatement of Smileyesque proportions. This much we know: Oldman’s spy isn’t coming in from the cold any time soon. His handlers, it seems, have shot him in the foot.
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