Either the critics this year are a lot less agreeable, a lot less enthusiastic or Metacritic is being a collective hard ass in its scoring but either which way, the only films in the Oscar race to get near 90 have been Harry Potter, Moneyball and The Artist. Now, Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy has at last topped them, with no bad reviews in sight, not yet anyway. Much praise for Gary Oldman throughout.
It has only two scores of 100, but positive reviews from unlikely bedfellows like Stephanie Zacharek, Kenneth Turan, Manohla Dargis,
Says Dargis with a great opening line:
Dread throbs like a heartbeat in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” a superb new adaptation of the 1974 spy novel by John le Carré. It’s a deep pulse that maintains its insistent rhythm throughout the film’s murmured conversations, life-and-death office intrigues, violence and yearning loves. The throbbing does a number on your nervous system — this is a movie you watch on high alert — and brings you into the state of mind that can feel like a state of siege and goes by the name of British secret service, or just the Circus. For those inside the intelligence service, like George Smiley, played with delicacy and understated power by Gary Oldman, knowledge is power, but so too is fear.
And Turan:
The question at the heart of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” is simplicity itself: Is there a Soviet secret agent at the very highest echelons of British intelligence? Getting to the answer, however, couldn’t be more deliciously, thrillingly, brilliantly complex.
Starring a surprising Gary Oldman and masterfully directed by Tomas Alfredson, “Tinker Tailor” comes by that complexity honestly, courtesy of the subtle, allusive 1974 John le Carré novel set in a merciless espionage world where trust is an illusion and nothing is remotely what it seems. This is a film to which very close attention must be paid, but the rewards of doing so are considerable.
Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir on Oldman:
As heroes of spy thrillers go, Smiley is utterly lacking in charisma or sympathetic qualities. If anything, Oldman humanizes the character even less than Alec Guinness did in his mild, owlish late ’70s performance; this Smiley makes no small talk, appears to have no friends or lovers and behaves with thoroughgoing ruthlessness in all directions. His only weakness, as he is well aware, is a grave one for a spy: His marriage has gone bad and his wife cheats on him with impunity, but he will apparently forgive her anything. (Unlike in the BBC version, Ann Smiley never appears here as a character, and is only glimpsed in long shots.) Indeed, this version of the story goes right to the edge of making Smiley not heroic at all. He’s a man doing a job, and it’s not at all clear what he believes about anything. As Smiley observes at one point, the Achilles’ heel he discerns in Karla, the mysterious head of “Moscow Centre,” is that he’s a true believer in the Soviet cause. That suggests, perhaps, that a successful professional hews to no ideology.
![2025 Oscars: Can a Late-Breaker Still Win Best Picture? [POLL]](https://www.awardsdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/gladiator-350x250.jpg)
