Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Focus Features’ “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” will be released in the US on November 18, just in time for the heating-up of Oscar season. The Telegraph says that the film will definitely be competing for BAFTAs and Oscars next spring.
The film features a veritable who’s who of great British (and Irish) male actors: Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley, a diminutive MI6 employee who uncovers a mole within his department. Other cast members include recent Oscar winner Colin Firth, Ciaran Hinds (one of my favorites), Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Mark Strong, among many others. Even the screenwriter, Peter Morgan, fits in: he wrote scripts for Oscar-winners The Queen and Frost/Nixon.
Though the dearth of female characters is unfortunate, it may herald a return to the Oscars crop of 2007 (No Country for Old Men, etc.), a field which was so completely anti-feminine that even the New Yorker ran a piece about it. But I have faith in Tinker, Tailor; not only is its source material beyond compare (at least, the 1979 TV miniseries starring Alec Guiness–I haven’t read the novel by John Le Carre), but its director, Thomas Alfredson, helmed the incredible Swedish vampire flick “Let The Right One In.” If anyone can create atmosphere and breathe new life into a much-told story, it’s him!
