(Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Also, my face during large portions of the new movie.)

Two only-vaguely-related things today!

First, I saw the new Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie in December. I never talked about it, largely because I felt it was a fine enough movie on its own, but mostly did disservice to the miniseries (not shocking when condensing six hours to two), with the exception of a few people who turned in better performances than the first time around.

They were Mark Strong and Tom Hardy, with Kathy Burke and Colin Firth coming in strong in the “Did a Take Different Enough to Stand Alone” Division. John Hurt and Ciaran Hinds did very well – it’s not as though the remake was short on talent – but without six hours to build their characters, there just wasn’t enough of them to stand out. What they did to Esterhase was a minor disaster, especially if they decide to do Smiley’s People. Partially due to time constraints that didn’t let the character breathe, Cumberbatch didn’t get near Michael Jayston’s Guillam, whose cool and slightly-murderous “Then I guess I’ll have to keep my mouth ultra, ultra shut” is one of the best line deliveries in a six-hour miniseries with Alec Guinness in it, which is saying something. Speaking of, unfortunately for Gary Oldman, Alec Guinnes WAS George Smiley, to the point that Le Carre based the character ON Guinness for later books, and though Oldman does well, there’s just no way that was ever going to work out in Guinness’s wake.

However, there is no denying that the movie wins handily in the aesthetics department. This is both because Alfredson knows how to frame a shot but good (see also Let the Right One In), and because in 1979 the BBC was shooting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in a basement by the light of a single lamp that had to be fed with coins every 15 minutes. (Smiley’s People turned out slightly better, looks-wise, but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a magnificently-written and -acted miniseries during which many actors pretended to eat restaurant food they couldn’t even see because the place was so murky and the walls were upholstered for some reason and I don’t even know.)

Alfredson’s direction of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy outclasses the look of the miniseries by a mile; gorgeous shots of information being passed back and forth, assignees at their stations processing data, and a control room that resembled nothing so much as a womb-y war room straight off a spaceship. It was sort of delightfully sci-fi – and the more you think about spy fiction, the more similarities with the speculative seem to pop up. (In tuxes. With invisible cars that they’re driving on a quest to discover hidden knowledge!)

That brings us to Second! My latest Intertitles, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sci-Fi: Espionage and the Speculative” is up now at Strange Horizons; in it, I nerd out for a while as I try to dissect some of the ways these two genres have gotten so cozy with one another that they sometimes share clothes.