Near the beginning of the new film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, just after he gets kicked out of the Circus, George Smiley gets a new pair of glasses.1 In contrast to the horn-rims he’s been wearing, the new frames are squarish bifocals that magnify his eyes.2 They remind us Smiley has, in exile, become a watcher, rather than a player.3 He’s removed from the action, behind glass.
And throughout the movie, so are we. Almost every scene in this movie is about windows: we frequently see characters or important actions through windows, rather than directly, at the least reminding us that we see each other through a glass darkly.
Most of the online stills from the movie don’t show this – probably because what makes a compelling framing on the theater screen doesn’t work as a promotional photograph where we want to see the actor – but I believe I’m right about it.
Consider the scene where Control learns from Jerry Westerby that Jim Prideaux has been shot. We see stunned and immobile Control in a corner of a window, pleading Jerry partly through a doorway – it emphasizes the opacity and inaccessibility of Control’s mind, ensnaring Jerry who desperately wants to move.4
Or when Smiley learns who Ann’s lover is, or when Ricki Tarr first sees Irina in action. Or when we see Oliver Lacon’s house. It’s all about the windows. I have to see the movie again with this in mind really to figure out what I think about it.
1This is brilliantly done – John Hurt’s Control says, “Smiley is leaving with me,” and we are looking at the back of Smiley’s head – but the little twitch that Gary Oldman gives indicates Smiley didn’t, until this moment, know he was also on the way out.
2The new specs of course look like Alec Guinness’s from the tv series; the lenses in them made me wonder if Oldman could actually see while playing this role.
3They also serve nicely to distinguish the flashbacks from the current narrative.
4John Hurt is great as Control, Stephen Graham – who I haven’t seen in anything since Snatch – is perfect for Westerby. In fact it’s overall a terrific, even perfect, cast.
The Edge of the American West 
19 comments
January 22, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Mike W
I completely agree about the glasses/windows/watching symbolism. In particular, the scene with Westerby and Control was excellent.
Regarding Oldman’s vision: during the optometrist scene, I’m pretty sure I saw the faint lines of contact lenses around Oldman’s irises. If the visual style required the lenses to be so thick and curved that they couldn’t actually be non-functional, it’s possible that he was wearing contacts that were designed to balance out the effect of the glasses. I refuse to confirm this conjecture because, after all, this is the internet.
January 22, 2012 at 6:07 pm
xaaronx
I thought SEK was back over here for a moment when I started reading this one.
Other than that, I’ll just note that I want to see the movie but that it probably won’t be until it makes it’s way to Netflix.
January 22, 2012 at 6:56 pm
ben
Ouch, dude.
January 22, 2012 at 9:20 pm
grackle
I’m eager to see it although I couldn’t understand why anyone felt the need to make it- Having recently seen the BBC Alec Guinness version, it still seems flawless but still, onward and upward with the arts I suppose and without the cold war background so close maybe there are different opportunities. Geoffrey Burgon’s Nunc Dimittis defined some essence of the earlier version. They may have used it in Smiley’s People too.
January 23, 2012 at 3:09 am
ajay
Apparently the problem was that the BBC series had a plot that made sense. The decision was taken to remove that element and replace it with the inexplicable evisceration of one minor character and a lot of topless bathing scenes.
January 23, 2012 at 8:40 am
John Perich
I hate being one of those people who pimps his own work, but I wrote something similar in my take on the film for OTI:
http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/12/21/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy/
(And I was consciously channeling the sort of analysis that SEK does, too)
January 23, 2012 at 9:25 am
Anderson
I’m eager to see it although I couldn’t understand why anyone felt the need to make it-
Apparently it was because Le Carre didn’t understand how to write his novel, so someone had to do a complete rewrite of it, so it could be a good story.
Also, Peter Guillam needed to be gay.
Nicely *made* movie, and I appreciate the difficulty of condensing the book into a film, but damn.
January 23, 2012 at 10:16 am
eric
Also, Peter Guillam needed to be gay.
I think there was good reason for this. Anthony Lane liked it as a choice –
– but I think misses the reason. After all, it wasn’t *that* toxic a secret – Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt were, in real life, gay, and that wasn’t their downfall. And in the film as in the book, Bill Haydon has both men and women lovers.
Which *is* the point of making Guillam gay in the movie. At the beginning of the film we see Guillam and Bill Haydon talking about women and leering at the new (female) secretary. We find out later both have female and male lovers. But there’s a contrast: for Bill it’s, like other things, an aesthetic choice. When it’s time to give them up, he pays off both, as a gentleman should, but shows no emotion.
Guillam also has to give up his boyfriend for professional reasons, but he’s genuinely heartbroken. We’re meant to see this contrast, which is part of a larger contrast between the younger and older generations. Ricki Tarr says he wants a family – not like you lot. He doesn’t get it, any more than Guillam. Both learn that if they’re to succeed in the Circus they need to give up personal relationships. The only people who rise in the secret service are sociopaths like Bill or people suffering broken lives, like Connie and Smiley – and now, Guillam and Tarr.
January 23, 2012 at 3:16 pm
JWL
Speaking of glasses, Guinness told the following story: having checked his coat at a restaurant, he was flattered when the hostess returned it without so much as a glance at his ticket stub. He was, after all, Sir Alec Guinness. Only later did he fish a note from his coat that read, “elderly bald gentleman with thick glasses”.
January 23, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Anderson
What I particularly hated about the movie was the ending, which implied Smiley reconciles with Ann, becomes the new Control (he does in a “caretaker” function in the book, but that’s omitted in the film), like it’s happy-ending time.
Whereas Prideaux is left being an ass to Roach, when in the book he’s the one who does have something like a happy ending, having apparently worked through the Haydon betrayal.
January 23, 2012 at 4:18 pm
eric
I didn’t see Smiley’s reconciliation with Ann as happy-ending time, but then, I’ve read the books. Even still, in the film, we never seen Ann’s face. We know Bill has used her, and he sensed that she was ready to be used in that way. I don’t think it’s especially cheerful. Especially given the overall picture of the professional/personal relationships as I described above.
As for Prideaux, it’s true, he is mean to Roach, but this also accords with the theme I sketched. And when you say that in the book he “worked through the Haydon betrayal” you mean “by snapping his neck with his bare hands,” so when you say “something like a happy ending” that’s … well, it depends what you mean by “something like”.
January 23, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Matt McKeon
Happy ending means he began to function again as a teacher and mentor towards Bill. And since Bill is a proto Smiley, a sense that life will go on.
I think the film works, although I loved the series. I like the Christmas party where the British agents all sing the Soviet anthem with gusto, and Santa Claus is Lenin.
In the series, Smiley slowly rakes the intelligence chiefs over the coals in the finale: its sadistic fun. Guiness: “There will some…(pause) redeployment.”
January 24, 2012 at 7:44 am
Anderson
And when you say that in the book he “worked through the Haydon betrayal” you mean “by snapping his neck with his bare hands,”
What’s unhappy about that?
Certainly better, btw, than a cowardly sniper shot.
January 24, 2012 at 7:48 am
eric
I’ll just point out that seeing Bill through the sniper scope is consistent with the lenses/windows/watching thing. The movie is making a point. It may not be one you like, or one you expected from having read the book. But it definitely has a point, and makes it pretty effectively.
January 24, 2012 at 9:10 am
Anderson
A sophomoric point. Spies! Watching people! Through windows!
(And, as Anthony Lane noted, wtf is Smiley doing in a room with about 60 windows for him to be observed (or shot) through?)
January 24, 2012 at 9:13 am
eric
I would put the point as “watchers can’t be players.” So that’s at least junioric. And consistent with le Carré’s theme of turning Bond on its head.
January 24, 2012 at 9:45 am
ajay
“And when you say that in the book he “worked through the Haydon betrayal” you mean “by snapping his neck with his bare hands,”
Just like he does with the owl at the start of the book. Oh, but wait, they decided that that rather elegant parallel wasn’t necessary for the film, because they needed a picture of Mark Strong with a rifle for the poster.
January 24, 2012 at 9:54 am
eric
Or because, as I’ve just suggested, the movie had its own way of playing on a theme.
It’s shocking, I know, but sometimes movies made from books aren’t note for note translations from page to screen.
January 25, 2012 at 5:16 am
ajay
Well, then, they did it because they decided that it was more important to turn the film into britishactorslookingthroughthings.tumblr.com than to preserve one of the rather good structural elements of the original book.