恶人谷

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PBS今年夏天有没有重播Lewis？

The screenplay, by Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, fails to provide any social, historical or political context to give the mole hunt any great urgency or wider importance. The cold-war backdrop to these events has disappeared. We are told that the Russians have had a mole in the agency for years, but we are never shown what the consequences of this are. Will the Red Flag soon be flying over Buckingham Palace? If Smiley is right when he claims there’s not much difference between us and them, why care what happens to British intelligence?

What seems to be at stake here is not the infiltration of British intelligence by the communists, but something worse — the American infiltration of British intelligence. The real battle going on here is between a pro-American cabal, led by Allenine, and the former controller of MI6 (John Hurt) and Smiley.

At times, the film is like one of those star-studded 1970s Agatha Christie movies that are full of familiar faces. But, unlike a Christie mystery that invites you to consider the evidence and make a guess as to who is guilty, Tinker Tailor keeps us out in the cold: we have to watch the experts do it. There are no clear clues that point to any of the main suspects, other than that they all, at various times, are shown to have the furtive, glaring faces of the guilty. I wish the film had spent more time on their back stories than on the overlong saga of the love affair between a British spy, Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy), and the wife of a Moscow agent. Consequently, we hardly to get to know them.

Then there is Smiley. He’s meant to be the grey man with the great mind: think John Major meets Sherlock Holmes. But we never get the pleasure of watching this great mind at work. There’s a key moment in the film when he’s listening over and over to a tape of Tarr, and suddenly has a significant breakthrough. Instead of discussing it with his Watson-like sidekick, Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch), so that we could understand his reasoning, we’re left in the dark. And the final scene where Smiley catches the mole is baffling. There’s no clear explanation as to why he should, on finding a suspect in a certain house, conclude that he is the guilty one.

The mark of a really great grown-up film is that it provides you with something to talk about on your way home from the cinema. Sadly, once you’ve made the comparisons with the 1979 BBC television series and praised the cast for their wonderful performances, there’s not much left to say. (Go on, take the Tinker Tailor test on your way home from seeing it.) That’s because the film is intellectually vacuous. There’s not one arresting or fresh idea here. Instead, it repeats the basic view of spies that goes from Conrad to Graham Greene to le Carré: that they are a grubby lot who will betray anyone.