Movie review: “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”

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We saw “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” on Monday. (Yes, two movies in one weekend.  Partner and I are decadent capitalists, I know.  We also had Chinese food at an excellent little neighborhood place near the theater both times.  So sue us.)

 

 

The movie is a dark little exercise in Cold War espionage.  If you need cheering up, do not see this movie.  Gary Oldman, as spy supreme George Smiley, seldom changes his facial expression through the whole two hours: he does a sort of neutral thing with his eyes and lips, and that’s the keynote of the whole production.

 

 

Simply stated, the plot is: “There’s a double agent, George.  Go find him.”

 

 

Who is it?  The arrogant Toby Jones? The smooth Colin Firth? The bullyish Ciaran Hinds?  The timid David Dencik?  Oldman himself?  (You can’t make any assumptions in a movie like this.)   Maybe one of the lower-level agents: the lean and sympathetic Mark Strong, or the intense Benedict Cumberbatch, or the 1970s-handsome Tom Hardy?

 

 

I won’t tell you.

 

 

You cannot miss a moment of this movie.  If you do, you’ll miss a bit of overheard dialogue, or a little piece of character exposition, or someone’s name that you didn’t catch before.  We didn’t even go to the bathroom for the whole two hours, and let me tell you, that is a near-miracle for the two of us oldsters.   I was straining to catch every word, and I still missed a few things (Partner and I caught each other up over egg rolls and pork fried rice after the movie).  

 

 

I can only tell you that I suspected the right person.

 

 

(Of course, I suspected all of them.)

 

 

If you want a time-travel ride back to 1973, with gray moody landscapes of London and Budapest and Paris, and lots of top-notch acting, you should see this.

 

 

Bring your brain along, and your ear trumpet.  You’ll need both.

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Movie review: “The Debt”

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Partner and I saw “The Debt” this past weekend. We mostly went for Helen Mirren, who is good in pretty much anything she does. (If you haven’t seen “The Queen,” drop your needlepoint and rush out to rent it, or something.) For once, I didn’t know the movie’s plot in advance; I only knew generally that it involved some Israeli Mossad agents who were reactivated to complete some unfinished business.

Who doesn’t like a spy thriller? A good spy thriller, I mean, with a little subtlety: good, and evil, and the huge gray area in-between. And huge symbols: the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall. Drab central-European landscapes and nondescript cities – Prague? Budapest? Berlin? Churches, dilapidated castles . . .

You know I hate suspense. I usually make a point of learning the ending in advance, just so I don’t have to suffer. Well, I didn’t see this one coming, so for once I had the pleasure of being surprised. The movie has a very neat twist about halfway through, which I did not expect.

But: the story is morally very cut-and-dried, good and evil, Mossad versus Nazi-butcher-in-hiding: how much more clear-cut can you get? We know who’s good and who’s evil.

But, then again, no we don’t.

There are some big plot holes here, which require some major suspension of disbelief.

But, in this movie, it’s all about the casting.

Each of the three main characters is seen in 1965 and in 1997, and so we require two actors for each. David, the sensitive soul, is Sam Worthington (who spent most of his time as a blue long-tailed alien in “Avatar”), and also Ciaran Hinds, who was the imperious Julius Caesar in the TV series “Rome.” Both are staring and vulnerable and very moving. Stefan, the pushy officious leader, is Marton Csokas, who was Celeborn in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and who’s very good (and also very handsome, and nice in a tight t-shirt) here, and also as Tom Wilkinson, that really stellar actor who can do pretty much anything. And Rachel, the key member of the group, is Jessica Chastain (whom I only recently met in “The Help,” as a vulnerable young housewife), and in later life, Helen Mirren, about whom I need say very little.

Lovely, all six of them.

But I need to say a word about the wonderful (and heretofore unknown to me) Danish actor Jesper Christensen.

His was a difficult role: a reworking of the Josef Mengele story. We first meet him as a doctor in East Berlin in 1965, and he is considerate and gentle and kind. We know he has butchered babies and children, back in the concentration camps; we try to keep all of that in mind. But he is enormously manipulative, and ultimately vicious. He uses his voice, his soft gentle reasonable voice, to accomplish everything. Early on in the movie, I thought: My god, he’s the serpent in the Garden of Eden. He’s using words to make these nice young people doubt themselves, and do things they shouldn’t do.

This movie: it’s a good old time in the cinema. There are some nasty bloody scenes, but you can shield your eyes. I did.

Go see it.

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