Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The anti-Bond spy movie, from the book by John Le Carre. Gary Oldman plays Smiley, an ex British intelligence agent who's called back on the job when his former boss (John Hurt) suspects the presence of a mole in his department. You have to go into this expecting a deliberately paced movie that doesn't spoon-feed you the whole plot. It's not action-packed. It's not about the sexy gadgets and unbelievable action sequences, but the withered perseverance of an aging spy who may not be sexy or hyper-masculine, but makes up for that in sheer intelligence and mental fortitude. It would have been nice, I suppose, if this movie had been a little faster paced at times, and there's a certain Britishness to it that reeks of stuffy good manners, and yet the movie is totally absorbing, even when it's difficult to follow. It has an actual mystery to it, which is something you generally don't get from a Bond picture. And Gary Oldman is a convincing lead, a bit embalmed perhaps, but he gets his character's human side across nonetheless.

Benedict Cumberbatch makes a strong impression as Oldman's right-hand-man, the scrappy assistant who knows how to get information without getting caught. Tom Hardy is also an interesting character, a spy who allegedly defects and becomes a target of British intelligence as a result. Colin Firth is one of the higher-up members of the British intelligence agency. He's good, but maybe it's only because we've come to expect good performances out of him that we don't demand proof of his acting talent. He's our new Laurence Olivier.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy lacks that little spark that might have elevated it to a great piece of entertainment (like David Fincher's Zodiac or Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential), but it's still a convincing movie, if too carefully constructed for its own good. Visually, it's a remarkable movie, capturing the gloom of England and Cold War Europe. It's one of the few movies in recent memory that looks believably set in an earlier time period than the present. The Cold War paranoia is alive and well in this movie, and perhaps it's the fact that the Cold War is now more than 20 years ended that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is worthwhile because of its seeming irrelevance. It goes down easier than something about more recent (or current) global conflicts, because we feel like it's behind us. But the shadowy phantoms of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have a way of lingering in your mind after the movie's ended, and even if you feel a bit dazed from the overlength, you appreciate that this movie doesn't insult your intelligence or pander to your emotions in some infantile fashion--the way we're used to being treated at the movies.

Directed by Tomas Alfredson. With Mark Strong, Ciarin Hinds, David Dencik, Stephen Graham, Simon McBurney, Toby Jones, Kathy Burke, Christian McKay, Svetlana Khodchenkova, Roger Lloyd-Pack, and Konstantin Khabensky. 2011.

The King's Speech

My expectations going into The King's Speech were low. It looked like Oscar-bait. It looked like a lot of scenes of Colin Firth making animalistic stammering noises to show us how painfully he struggled to improve his speech. While the movie had moments where it seemed to be aiming for an Oscar, the story it told was fascinating, and didn't need to be elevated into awards material. It's about British royalty, particularly British royalty in the 1930s, and so what it needed was to be taken down a few notches. Geoffrey Rush gives the movie this necessary derailing. He plays Lionel Logue, a speech therapist to whom the Duke of York (soon to be King George VI) goes for help with his impediment. Lionel is not impressed with the pomp of George's royal status and doesn't afford the future king any extraneous privileges.

Firth is somber looking in another tasteful performance (he was very somber and tasteful in 2009's A Single Man, as an English professor), but he manages to break through the clinched veneer of his character to let a little humor and a lot of vulnerability into his performance. As his wife, a young Queen Mother, Helena Bonham Carter has such a high amount of potential within her as an actress. You can sense the wit she carries inside herself as it comes through in little movements, facial expressions, and in the way she carries herself. It's quite fun watching her leading her husband around like a shepherd with one of his sheep, and yet never overtaking his station. She's quite lovely, and quite an intelligent, fiery actress. Watching her keep that fieriness in check is fascinating because she seems to be in such command of her performance.

The movie cannot resist giving us a bit of the World War II treatment, tapping into the tension that was stirring in Europe in the 1930s. Of course it's obvious that England needed a king who could get his way through a sentence without stammering incoherently, especially during a time of war, so WW2 gives the story weight and significance. After all, why are we to care about a privileged royal son's speech problems? Surely the sympathy belongs to the underlings of the empire who cannot afford the luxury of a speech therapist. Surely we are better off caring for Rush's middle class dwelling and his middle class family. And yet the Logues are never portrayed as greedy, pining opportunists trying to glom onto the king's prestige. They are content with who they are much more so than the king himself. There's a scene when the radio carries the news of impending war, and you get a sense of the fear in their faces that one or both of their sons may be summoned to fight for the Crown.

Colin Firth may get the bulk of the award recognition for this picture (and he is good here), but I believe it is Geoffrey Rush who carries The King's Speech, and Helena Bonham Carter as well. Their performances were among the highlights of the movie. The cinematography of Danny Cohen was another. At first I groaned because I was afraid the murkiness of the exteriors--London is known for its rainy, foggy days--would make the movie a dull, depressing drag. But Cohen manages to make it visually interesting and gives the material a fluidity that it desperately needs. You can't squeeze much juice out of crusty upper-class British drama without a little help, and it's partly to the cinematographer's credit that The King's Speech is so watchable. It's not only watchable, it's quite funny, with a particularly amusing scene of the king shouting profanities at the top of his lungs as a vocal exercise.

Also starring Guy Pearce as David, the eldest son of George V and briefly his successor (his philandering ways force him out of the throne), Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill, Claire Bloom as their mother, Michael Gambon as George V, Eve Best as David's American lover, and Jennifer Ehle as Lionel's wife. Written by David Seidler. Directed by Tom Hooper. 111 minutes.

A Single Man

In A Single Man, Colin Firth is George Falconer, a 50-something English professor living in L.A. (although he's a native of England) in 1962. Since the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), George wakes up, he gets dressed, he goes to work, he comes home, and everything in between is so painfully contrived that he operates more like a machine than a man. Still, there are glimmers of life amidst his cookie cutter existence. 

Living in a Leave it to Beaver-style neighborhood, George chafes against the provincialism of his surroundings and maintains a faux-sophisticated relationship with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), also English, the two of them isolated expatriates, unsure of their roots anymore. George is cynical, Charley pretends not to be, and the gin flows freely in their tumultuous meeting that night (this story unfolds in the course of one 24-hour-period, with flashbacks of George's former life with Jim). Charley is George's only friend, and yet there's a distance between them that George maintains. She was the one, however, that he went to the night he received word that Jim had died in Michigan in a car accident (and that he wasn't welcome at Jim's funeral).

George approaches this day with a new-found determination. He's going to kill himself.

Tom Ford, who started out his career as a production designer, makes his directing debut with A Single Man, which spends so much time in close-up that we practically become experts of the actors' pores. It's a glossy affair, one that seems at times like postcards extracted from the early 60s, and at other times recalls the sumptuous intensity of a 1950's soaper, not unlike an earlier film starring Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven). 

Christopher Isherwood's book, though very literate, is also inherently cinematic in the way it unfolds, and so the task of screenwriter David Scearce isn't one of selecting and arranging but of heightening the dramatic appeal. There hasn't been a movie this visually opulent for a long while, and I think we can attest to Ford's prowess as a production designer that the movie looks so good, and not just good, but seamlessly rich in detail; at times it appears pretentious, but there's such a thread of humor about the whole production that it takes the wind out of the deliberately high drama.

The performance by Colin Firth is top notch, somewhat reminiscent of Laurence Olivier, but then this is the kind of part that seems almost too obviously geared toward winning an award. And yet Firth does it justice, maintaining the clinched, formal composure that offsets the visual razzle-dazzle. There's a lot of Vertigo in this movie, particularly in the music score by Abel Korzeniowski, as well as the voyeuristic approach Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take to the movie. There are constant close-ups of lips and eyes and legs and backs and bodies floating in the water...it's very European without losing its Hollywood-ness.

A Single Man isn't for every taste, but it deserves much praise for what it does well and what it doesn't do. Its deadly serious subject matter could have been a lot heavier and therefore a lot grimmer if not for the humor and the visual largesse that constantly reminds us we're watching a movie. ★★★