Playing Those Mind Games

So I finally got to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There were no car chases causing chaos in the streets. There were no shoot-outs wasting truck loads of ammunition. There were no protracted scenes of lovingly framed violence-porn. There were no shouty exchanges where characters ranted about the unfairness of it all. There were no crude jokes, gross gags or buddy banter. There were no references to money as an overriding motivation. There were *gasp* no love-conquers-all storylines.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a subdued film, mostly about watching and waiting, baiting and pre-empting, not drawing attention to oneself and using brain power to bring down the bad guys. Not your typical cinema fare these days, and yet the audience was the most rapt and blissfully unchatty one I’ve experienced in many years, everyone mirroring the tense quietness of the movie, their collective attention enthralled by the minimal movements and guarded glances of Smiley and his well-behaved cohorts at the Circus.

I enjoyed the film's recreation of the Cold War atmosphere of 1973, of a paranoid world still run by the weary men and women who'd been forged in dark fires of WW II, a breed both ruthless and yet touchingly ideological. The products, the clothes, the graffitti hinting at the times to come were all wonderfully wrought. However, my mechanically minded brother spotted a technical anachronism that hasn’t yet made the internet lists - I just checked, but believe me, even knowing what the goof-ups are, I still wouldn’t have noticed any them. Plus, there is such a thing as being too anal about a movie doing outdoor scenes forty years after the fact. Anyway, I thought long and hard about revealing this tidbit, but in honour of the film’s theme of withholding information and messin’ with heads...