![]() ![]() A well-connected civil servant, hushed, conspiratorial Oliver Lacon (Simon McBurney, naturally), recruits Smiley and an assistant, the younger spy Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Watson to Smiley’s Sherlock), to decipher which of his ex-colleagues is a high-level spy passing secrets to the Russians. The tale is more or less as Le Carré had it, give or take the odd tweak– Hong Kong becomes Istanbul, for one, and Czechoslovakia is now Hungary. Moreover, how to cram so much information about retired, ex-MI6 luminary Smiley’s quiet, mechanical campaign to uncover ‘a mole right at the heart of the Circus’ into a feature-length version while keeping Le Carré’s ample fruity characterisations and wry comments about a changing Britain? How to match or surpass the 1979 five-hour version starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley – now played by Gary Oldman, lately much-missed by serious cinema – a British spy so colourless and dissimilar to James Bond that he would fit more comfortably in the tea rooms of a provincial railway station than on a tropical beach or in a Caribbean country club? Any film of John Le Carré’s 1974 Cold War spy novel ‘Tinker Tailor Solider Spy’ has the twin shadows of the book and TV series hanging over it. ![]()
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