On New Year's Eve, mom and I went out to Regal Beagle in Brookline and had salt cod cakes and some sort of warm whiskey and lemon concoction called a "Wisecracker" and then went to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the Coolidge Corner Cinema.
This is the film version of the John Le Carre novel, filmed long ago as a famous miniseries starring Alec Guinness as a depressed and unwillingly retired British intelligence agent named George Smiley. The old version aired on the BBC in 1979 and in the US on Masterpiece Theater, and my father and I watched it together on Sunday nights on our aged TV set with the bent rabbit ears.
I was about fourteen and Dad was about fifty, when we watched together. I went by day to a big, shabby city school to be smart and miserable, and he went by day in his crumpled raincoat and wide '70s tie to a job in state government in a faceless downtown Boston office block. A job that left him tired, I think, and represented a disappointment of his younger-day dreams, but he stuck to it for his family's sake, and he cheerfully attended all us kids' band concerts, art shows, football games, Scout dinners and such, and went to Mass and supported the doings of his and my mom's vast and complex families.
But when he needed to get away, he read voraciously, histories of Renaissance Europe or the American Civil War or the great World Wars that had shaped his own family's lives, and in fiction, Saul Bellow's sad-sack, wise-cracking antiheroes, and Mario Puzo's salty Mafioso revenge cycles and George V. Higgins' tragi-comic Boston noir, and John Le Carre, too.
My dad was the very antithesis of a George Smiley--his weaknesses were the weaknesses of a ruddy-faced, talkative, impractical Irishman, not Smiley's apparently still and colorless British bureaucrat--but I think something in him deeply sympathized with Le Carre's version of a civil servant underdog, treated with indifference and indignity, perennially underestimated, outfoxing all his more arrogant and confident and obstreperously successful rivals.
The current film is one of those marvels of recovered memory and cultural detail they put out these days. In one scene, a senior British mandarin has Smiley to his own home to discuss a top secret dilemma, and I was completely distracted by his clothes: the greyish-brown wide-check sports coat over a ribbed turtleneck, the pleated slacks, the vast plastic-rimmed eyeglasses, so exactly matched the "casual" clothes of dad, my uncles, of grown men when I was little that I felt our attic had been raided, or rather, the things had been magicked back, unaged, from that decade, along with the misshapen cars with overflowing ashtrays, the pine panelling and godless wallpaper patterns. If you could bottle a decade's light, somehow the cinematographer of Tinker, Tailor, has done it, has captured the very deadened light that seemed to pervade that disappointed decade.
There are other things to say about the movie. How the cast is an amazing shiny present to all of us who ever consumed far too much of the British Isles' videography, a cast that will send you zooming between then (John Hurt in Crime and Punishment, Nineteen Eighty Four, Alien) and now (Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock and Tom Hardy in Inception and Cieran Hinds in Rome and Colin Firth from, well, everything) with Gary Oldman the tall, gaunt, unshockable link across the decades. How long, how far, from Gary as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy and as Joe Orton and Dracula, to Gary Oldman as the weary defender of a British entrenched order whose best case is that it's just a little less ugly then its enemies.
And you could say a lot, watching this cold-hearted, tense and grey-skied Cold War drama, about how we, the West, replaced one game with another, one war with another, one set of enemies with another.
But I'm not actually as ready to talk about that political story, as I am about the pleasures of recovered memory, of story rebooted and rewoven. I don't know how many other people out there would find a potent temporal tunnel between 1979 and now on the dusty wings of a half-forgotten spy drama, but if you do: let's drink (something horrible and heavily advertised--remember TV liquor ads?) to spies like us, then and now.
