You Love to See It: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 adaptation of acclaimed novelist John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an almost pathologically quiet film. Its focus rests not on the knife’s-edge tension and sudden violence of field work but on the banality of tradecraft on home soil, the colorless rooms and colorless people and the colorless stories they tell one another, pick apart, and repurpose. It’s a film about lights going out, about the total heat death of its characters’ emotional lives in the cold void of the work they do. The film’s set decoration, done by Tatiana Macdonald in England and by Zsuzsa Mihalek in Hungary, and Jacqueline Durran’s costuming don’t so much echo this idea as enflesh it, coming together into perhaps film’s definitive vision of a world in the colors of dust, old wallpaper, and concrete.

The Circus, MI6’s tongue-in-cheek sobriquet for its headquarters and the apparatchiks who run it, is a desolate space. Brown filing cabinets. Gray suits. Bare walls. The secure room in which its higher-ups conduct their business consists solely of a long, plain table and walls covered in rust-colored foam soundproofing. The men who occupy it are no different, suits and ties matched to its woodwork, its floor, the metronome set on the tabletop. Even their skin and clothing are not always immediately distinguishable, and when they move to the building’s open roof the pale expanse of London seems about to swallow them whole, clear skies rendered oppressive and empty by the film’s cold color palette.

Nowhere, though, is Tinker, Tailor’s meticulous design sensibility applied more thoroughly than to its protagonist, George Smiley (Gary Oldman). Smiley, who changes his facial expression perhaps twice in the course of the film, nearly always matches his backdrop, a chameleon proceeding with reptilian slowness and deliberation through a jungle of beige, gray, cream, and charcoal. When he listens to Ricky Tarr’s tragic account of his (Tarr’s) mission in Istanbul he blends seamlessly into the dull wallpaper of his sitting room. When he meets Lacon and the unnamed PM in a parking garage he is all over gray and charcoal, even his hair matching the drab brutalism around him. It is an aesthetic so coherent it becomes hypnotic, drawing you in until, like Smiley listening to Tarr’s account of Kremlin officers laughing about their mole in the Circus, you finally see the pattern in the noise.