Old Yorker

  • Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tomas Alfredson (2011)

    The BBC dramatisation of John le Carré’s 1974 novel was a big success when first screened in the autumn of 1979 and quickly acquired a classic status – a status rightly centred on Alec Guinness’s portrait of George Smiley.  The storyline was notoriously complicated and the serial penetrated the public consciousness both immediately (Terry Wogan did a weekly routine about the impenetrable plot on his Radio 2 breakfast show) and more enduringly (I may be wrong but don’t recall people, before Tinker Tailor,  using the word ‘mole’ the way they do now).  Directed by John Irvin from a screenplay by Arthur Hopcraft, the BBC version featured some fine supporting performances, a distinctive palette (I recall the phrase ‘latrine green’ being used in one review), an enjoyable Russian doll title sequence, and a memorable score by Geoffrey Burgon, including a Nunc Dimittis.  I’m no fan of le Carré and soon gave up on the book but I did enjoy the television adaptation and was mildly offended when I learned about this new film.  There’s no good reason for that:  thirty years would be a perfectly respectable interval between screen versions of books far superior to Tinker Tailor, especially when the material has not been adapted for cinema previously.  But watching Tomas Alfredson’s film brings to mind Philip Larkin’s line ‘Life is first boredom, then fear’.   The fear in this case is (as with Larkin) a dread certainty:  that you’ll be seeing clips of the movie repeatedly in the months of award ceremonies that lie ahead.

    The Irvin-Hopcraft Tinker Tailor seemed to take you deeper into the thickets of the story.  The screenplay for Alfredson’s film, by Bridget O’Connor (who died in late 2010 and to whom the film is dedicated) and Peter Straughan, adds another narrative thread then another without the plot thickening, without any momentum building.   It may be easier in a seven-part serialisation than in one two-hour movie to develop the dramatis personae incrementally; but it’s still disappointing that we get, for example, nearly the whole of Ricki Tarr’s story in one, protracted telling of it.  The character of Peter Guillam similarly seems to be delivered in a single, indigestible helping, culminating in a perfunctory indication that he’s gay (there was no such implication that I recall in the television version).  I remember the homosexual relationship between Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux being surprisingly but incisively revealed towards the end of the BBC serial:  here it’s telegraphed at an early stage, when Connie Sachs shows Smiley a photograph of the two men, with Prideaux’s arm round an uncharacteristically grinning Haydon’s shoulder – ‘Inseparable, as always’, says Connie, meaningfully.  The nature of this relationship is then left treading water until Haydon is eventually revealed to be the mole and, as such, responsible for Prideaux getting shot on a mission to Budapest to bring back proof of the treachery at the top of British intelligence.  The nearly opening sequence in which Prideaux gets a bullet (as well as a metaphorical knife) in the back is very well staged and cut by Alfredson and his editor Dino Jonsäter.  The pair shared the editing credit on Let the Right One In and Alfredson again has Hoyte Van Hoytema as his DoP.  I liked the panning movements of the camera in the early stages of the film; later on, its fixing of ‘key’ visual details (like Smiley’s cigarette lighter, which comes into the possession of his Soviet nemesis Karla and reveals the latter’s presence in the Budapest café which Alfredson flashes back to) is disappointingly clichéd.

    Of course it’s easy to say, when you know the story, that it’s obvious who the mole will be but I think it is here, for two reasons.   First, the fact that the bisexual Haydon has been or is screwing both Prideaux and Smiley’s wife Anne gives him a substance outside the closed doors world of ‘the Circus’ completely denied to the other three suspects – Percy Alleline, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase.  Second, Haydon is played by Colin Firth, now by some way the biggest name in the cast:  it’s the same syndrome often at work in television police series like Inspector Morse or its spin-off Lewis – you suspect the star name signed up only because s/he has the plum role of the villain.   As a quasi-whodunnit, Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor is jejune and the moment at which the mole is unmasked almost remarkable for its anti-climax.  This may well increase the praise the film gets.  There are people whose liking for John le Carré seems to be based on a belief that his long-winded sententiousness makes spy writing classy, and who will likely welcome the solemnly monotonous pacing and Alfredson’s disdain for the vulgarity of making us interested in who the mole is.  This approach might be all right if this Tinker Tailor brought a different kind of depth or texture to the story but it doesn’t:  it merely turns most of the suspects into nonentities.

    Gary Oldman came to prominence in the mid-1980s playing subversives – Sid Vicious, Joe Orton.  I’ve not seen Sid and Nancy but Oldman wasn’t in any way exciting in Prick Up Your Ears and he now seems to be cast increasingly for his physical anonymity[1] [2].  It seems an age before Smiley utters a line (even when he’s been asked a question, he keeps his mouth shut):  Tomas Alfredson thus increases our anticipation of what he’ll sound like – ‘Oldman Talks!’  When he eventually does, it turns out to be an erratic pastiche of Alec Guinness, who made George Smiley’s lack of charisma – and a muted sense of defeat that eclipsed the man’s cleverness – compelling.  There’s no denying that Oldman is faceless and impersonal as Smiley but in the wrong way – he’s merely uninteresting.  Alfredson appears to have encouraged other members of the cast to suggest bored instruments of the British establishment but none of these players is convincingly depersonalised or even anonymous:  they’re actors putting on expressions of expressionlessness.  On the rare occasions they come to life, they seem like bad actors, partly because the lurch from poker face to emotion is so clumsy:  Stuart Graham, who plays ‘The Minister’, is the very worst offender in this respect.  (I do wonder if the fact that Alfredson’s first language isn’t English is a disadvantage – that he doesn’t ‘hear’ the actors as fully as he might.)

    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is being trumpeted as a display of formidable British acting talent but most of the characterisations are crude or vapid.  Even to compare the playing of Benedict Cumberbatch (Peter Guillam) or David Dencik (Toby Esterhase) or Ciarán Hinds (Roy Bland) or Simon McBurney (Oliver Lacon) with the work of those who played these roles on television (Michael Jayston, Bernard Hepton, Terence Rigby and Anthony Bate respectively) seems disrespectful to the latter group.  It’s good to see Kathy Burke again and, as Connie Sachs, she’s a vivid presence in the flashback sequences to an MI6 Christmas party, but she too is a letdown when she speaks:  as Sally said, it just sounds like Kathy Burke putting on a posh(ish) voice.  She’s ill at ease and quite lacking in the vivid eccentricity that made Beryl Reid so strong in the BBC serial.  Colin Firth’s thin, obvious performance makes you realise how complete a character Ian Richardson made of Bill Haydon.  Alexander Knox’s Control wasn’t one of the standouts on TV but John Hurt, though impressively ravaged to look at, isn’t overwhelming either.

    I’d be hard put to find a single instance where the characterisation in the film is stronger than in the BBC serial but Toby Jones (Alleline) and Mark Strong (Prideaux) do well.  (Michael Aldridge and Ian Bannen respectively played these parts on television.)  Toby Jones uses his own dwarfishness to reinforce Alleline’s anxiety to be in charge:  he’s almost pitifully aggressive (and vocally dynamic).  Strong has both a warmth and a dexterity of expression that keep you interested in the tragic figure of Jim Prideaux – and this in spite of the fact that he also has the worst of the production’s bad wigs.  (Another of them – a gingery number – is on the head of Tom Hardy’s Rikki Tarr at one stage.  Hardy isn’t as flexible as Hywel Bennett was as Tarr but he does have a couple of good moments and might have had more if he hadn’t been saddled with such a lengthy monologue.)  When Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux make eye contact at the Christmas party, Strong is so subtle and incisive compared with Oscar-winner Colin Firth you feel there’s no justice in the acting world.

    There are two interesting bits at the prep school where Prideaux, missing presumed dead in Budapest, has started a kind of afterlife as a teacher.   When he takes a shine to an unprepossessing new boy called Bill, there’s a connection between Mark Strong and the (uncredited?) child playing Bill that occurs almost nowhere else in the film (even though the relationship between them is resolved in a poor and predictable way).  Jim Prideaux is ridiculed by the other boys – as the hunchback of Notre Dame, thanks to the limp he’s left with from the bullet wound – but when an owl flies into the classroom and startles them, Prideaux disposes of it with brutal efficiency.  This isn’t followed through – it doesn’t seem to impress the boys into realising he’s not simply Quasimodo – but the incident has a charge because it links dramatically to Prideaux’s former life.  And Mark Strong, with an expressiveness that’s most unusual in this already overrated film, is able to suggest that former life continuously.

    17 September 2011

    [1] See The Dark Knight (2008).

    [2] Afternote:   I did change my mind about Oldman’s Orton on another viewing of Prick Up Your Ears.

  • This Property Is Condemned

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sydney Pollack (1966)

    Only the prologue and the epilogue derive from the Tennessee Williams one-act play of the same name.  What comes in between is credited to three writers, including Francis (pre-Ford) Coppola.  (The others are Fred Coe and Edith Sommer.)  Alva Starr is the flirty elder daughter of the hard-as-nails, rancorous landlady of a boarding house in a small Mississippi town in the Depression years.  The film is about Alva’s love affair with a new arrival in the town, Owen Legate, a railway ‘efficiency expert’ whose job is to tell railroad workers they’re losing their jobs.   The plot is framed by sequences set a few years in the future:  Alva’s sister Willie is telling a younger boy the story of what happened.  It’s not clear how Willie now spends her days other than in the way we see her at the start:  walking along the local railroad track (which looks out over the Starr boarding house – now boarded up, with the condemned property sign on it) and singing a wan little song (written for the film by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, which we hear a bit too often).  It’s not clear either how the Willie of the main action  – an unruly, tomboyish teenager with a strong streak of resilience – has been reduced to this feyly demented creature, who trips around wearing clothes and jewellery inherited from her elder sister.  The older Willie, because she seems a Tennessee Williams archetype, appears to be used in these sequences for purposes of orientation – to signal to the audience that we’re in Williams country.   It’s a mark of the success of Coppola and his co-writers in scripting material with a life of its own that the start and end of the picture seem unconvincingly tacked on.

    It’s obvious from the above that there are other Williams landmarks – a bitter, dominating mother (Mr Starr went AWOL some years ago), the handsome stranger in town/gentleman caller;  although Alva herself seems to be conceived as something earthier than Blanche Dubois, she belongs to the same I-don’t-want-realism-I-want-magic school of thought.   The screenplay is skilful – Williams-lite rather than mere pastiche – but the film inevitably depends strongly on the actress in the leading role and watching Natalie Wood as Alva is a lowering experience.   This is partly because she’s bad and partly because I felt guilty finding her not just bad but embarrassing.    Why guilty?  One reason is simply that it seems unkind to think unkindly about someone who was dead at the age of forty-three.  (Wood’s early death also gives an unhappy edge to the heavy hints dropped throughout the film that Alva isn’t long for this world.)  Another is that Wood isn’t a technically incompetent actress and she’s conscientious in the role – but every gesture and inflection seems so preconceived that the effect is mechanical and shallow.

    Although Wood has a lovely face and figure, her moments of nakedness have something of the see-I’m-game-for-anything effect of Julie Andrews baring her breasts in 10 – with the difference that, whereas Andrews had made her name in roles where she really did seem unassailably virginal (not to say asexual), Natalie Wood’s ingénue quality on screen seems another element of her falseness as an actress.  She does have a sexual presence.  She seems to be not so much unconscious of this (which might be appealing) as simply unable to draw on it in a way that would make her more convincing in a role like this one.  Alva is clearly supposed to be hot-blooded, impetuous, a romantic and romancing free spirit.   Natalie Wood’s neat, practised acting suggests none of these qualities.   They seem to belong much more to Mary Badham, who has a likeable, quirky warmth as the younger sister.

    Wood was twenty-eight when she did this film.  Robert Redford, in the role of Owen, was two years older but the effect of his presence and acting style, compared with hers, is to make you think Owen is having an affair with an older woman.  Redford has always shown an intuitive understanding of how little he needs to project on screen, the confidence to underplay and the ability to suggest a brain behind the face – the tension between his glamour and his miniaturist approach to expressing emotion is an important part of his star quality.   His performance here is refreshingly relaxed, compared not only with Wood’s box of tricks but with much of the supporting acting going on around him.   Yet you can also see in this role early signs of what has stopped Redford from becoming a major screen actor:  it’s a quality of looking after himself, of never giving too much of himself away – as an actor.   This quality has served him well when it fuses with the character he’s playing and the central relationship that the film describes, making him all the more magnetically unreachable in two later, bigger Sydney Pollack films – to Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were and to Meryl Streep in Out of Africa.   But Redford’s effectiveness on screen has got to rely so much on the emotional temperature and tension of elements in the film other than himself that he has come to seem not so much mysteriously aloof as parasitic.

    Three particular moments in Property seem to anticipate his future in front of the camera.  First, when Owen arrives asking for a room at the boarding house, Alva’s mother (well played by Kate Reid) asks him, ‘You’re not a vagrant, are you?’   I’m sure this question would have sounded ludicrous even if the well-groomed Redford had never made another picture – but it’s a good deal more ludicrous now:  one can rarely remember seeing a hair out of place in the forty years since Property was made.  Second, when the entire population of the boarding house – both sexes, all ages – suddenly decide to go skinny-dipping, Alva, who’s already annoyed with Owen, chides him:  ‘I suppose you’re not coming – too scared to take your clothes off?’   He replies, ‘No, I’m not coming’ (and Redford delivers the line perfectly – his tone is quietly self-possessed while his face blushes very slightly).  Alva’s right to the extent that Robert Redford always does keep his clothes on emotionally.  Third, after Alva has followed Owen to New Orleans, she seeks him out then keeps eluding him.  We understand why Alva is doing this:  she knows her hopes of happiness with Owen are doomed when he finds out what happened the night he left Mississippi.  (Alma got drunk, got married to a man her mother thought was her beau but who’s lusting after Alva, and walked out on him and the town the next morning.)   But the moment of their reunion is delayed because Owen, having seen her in the street, takes his time.  He doesn’t rush to embrace Alva but follows her at a discreet distance, through the streets and into a park.  Eventually, we see their reflections on either side of a pond and hear them speak to each other.   I couldn’t make sense of Owen’s tentativeness in this scene in the context of the film; yet it seems right, given Redford’s innately watchful, detached temperament as a performer.

    This is a long-winded way of saying there’s no chemistry between Natalie Wood and Robert Redford but the fact that they don’t connect – and that, although near contemporaries, they seem a generation apart as screen stars – is actually what fascinated me about the film.  It’s well written, competently directed, and an entertaining story but it’s the limitations and ambiguities of the two leads that really engages your attention at this distance in time.  This Property Is Condemned features an interesting mixture of big names of the era (and of an earlier era) and of the future – not just Coppola and Redford.   This was Sydney Pollack’s second feature as a director; the producer was John Houseman; the cinematographer was James Wong Howe.   Charles Bronson plays the one-night-stand husband:  it’s plain to see he’s not much of an actor but interesting to find his strong presence in a film of this kind rather than an action picture.

    28 November 2008

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