Atomic Express

Just got out of the theatre and had to put fingers to keyboard. I just read Peter Hitchen’s scathing….(no, not strong enough…eviscerating? flaying?) review of the film in a British newspaper where he goes on and on about how he hates the 2011 version because it is different from the book that he liked thirty years ago. Really? A movie that actually DIFFERS from the book? Wow…..does anybody really give a damn whether Prideaux is caught in Czechoslovakia or Hungary? Oh wait-a younger audience is relatively unaware that the Czech Republic and Slovakia were a single country once. This reminds me of the people who argue over the intricacies of Klingon dialect or how many phasers the USS Enterprise has in the movie versus the original series. I won’t bother you, dear readers, with a blow-by-blow autopsy or refutation. Let me tell you about my experience.

TTSS was only available as a limited engagement here in Kingston. The big box theater on the west end of town did not want to show it so a smaller theatre near the university brought it in for a week. There were no more than ten people in the audience and, as my fiancé pointed out, we were the youngest ones there. I was familiar with the BBC miniseries, which I enjoyed, but I always found Le Carre’s  (David Cornwall IRL) books impenetrable as they were written for British subjects that grew up between the years 1940 to about 1970. In other words, they are not accessible nor are they timeless works of literature. They were written at a specific time, about a specific time and they are not really meant for my generation and successor generations, and they were especially not written North Americans living in the 21^st century. In effect, David Cornwall’s early body of work will be less and less accessible as the context of the Cold War continues to recede. Only specialists or people intensely interested in the Cold War will really be able to understand the George Smiley series as the decades pass on.

As a Cold War historian au fait with the context and the jargon and the process of the “game”, I found the 2011 film to be accessible and enjoyable, but I fear that it might not be to others. It was just complex enough, though my fiancé had to whisper from time to time, “What is the Circus?” “What is Moscow Centre?” Being my fiancé, she knew what MI-6 and the KGB were, just not Cornwall’s jargon. Others who are younger have no clue what the KGB was, so it is a toss up whether identifying Moscow Centre as the KGB in the film would have been beneficial.

Nobody seems to positively comment on the film’s atmospherics. They are exceptionally well done. Imagine a gray version of 1970s fashion and décor. The film portrays, for want of a better term, gray decay-decay in architecture, decay in weather, decay in people, decay in morality. Plastic faux-leather jackets of the Eastern Bloc. The stink of Istanbul. Too many cigarettes and stale sweat around the code-machine late at night. The stink of primal fear as an aircraft propeller whirls feet, then inches away. And the acting was just right. It didn’t have to be bombastic, it needed to be understated, and it was. How much of the Cold War spy game consisted of waiting? A lot of it. Is that difficult to portray on film in the age of the blockbuster action movie? Hell, yes. Does this film provide us with the right level of suspense? Hell, yes.

Another notable point is the use of violence in the film. The Soviets and their allies are the ones who employ it, not the British (with the one exception of a lone gunman….). The Soviets played the game dirty in real life and they play it dirty in the 2011 version of TTSS. Throat cuttings, disembowelment, abrupt execution at point blank range, ‘psychic driving’ interrogation techniques, this version of TTSS leaves no doubt that the West is under threat from a psychotically violent Communist system that will corrupt individuals, destroy and then discard them in the pursuit of their objectives. This is another point of diversion from the Cornwall books where it is the spymasters of the West who throw away their pawns for minimal gain (see “The Looking Glass War” for example) and engage in other forms of morally corrupting behaviour. Here it is the Soviets who deliberately introduce corrosive individuals into the body espionagatic, who sleep with everybody, generate jealousies, and introduce moral chaos into an otherwise ordered and stiff British world.

With the right supporting context, this version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” could be used to explain the subtle basics of the Cold War spy game. Deep penetration agents, deception, mole hunts and the damage they cause, the ongoing chess game to place ineffective and damaging people in important positions so that the real operatives can move into junior slots with access and influence. You can’t get the next generation to sit down for the whole seven-part BBC series let alone Cornwall’s novels, but you just may be able to get them to sit for this version. And they will understand the cynicism without any problem.

(PS: Peter Hitchens does make one important point: Cornwall’s childish anti-Americanism that is so rampant in his latest books is unnecessary and appalling. As a partially inarticulate but un-incorrect respondent on his blog noted, “But the main reason [the film] fails is because it’s based on a stupid false book written by a stupid British writer, a proponent of British style of writing when everything comes not from one’s own experiences but from one’s sick fantasies. It’s false, false, false, and remember we are the good guys and you, brits are the bad ones and always have been.”)