It’s a gray day in London and two men in suits contemplate chess pieces crowned with crumpled photographs of double agents employed by Britain’s secret spy service, code-named “The Circus.”
“There’s a rotten apple,” whispers curmudgeonly MI6 boss Control (played by John Hurt) to his underling. “And we have to find it.”
It’s not Tom Cruise dangling from the world’s tallest office building, but the mind games played in upcoming espionage thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy prove every bit as riveting — and a hell of a lot more realistic — than the shoot-’em-ups we’ve come to expect from Hollywood spy spectacles.
“James Bond films are great to look at and a lot of fun but they are fairy tales,” said director Tomas Alfredson in a Skype interview with Wired.com. “They are not in any way close to anything [that happened] in reality in those days within MI5 or MI6. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is not a documentary of course, but I wanted to do a film that was accurate about how it felt and how it looked, and give at least an interpretation of how it actually was.”
The film adaptation of John le Carré’s classic Cold War espionage novel, opening Dec. 9, is the latest low-key espionage story to serve as a brooding reality check to the bigger, badder, louder school of action-fantasy embodied by the James Bond and Mission: Impossible movie franchises. In place of gunplay, car chases and building-hopping, this alt-spy fare focuses on the psychological toll exacted on professional liars who, more often than not, wind up being pawns in their own spy games.
Set in 1973, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy‘s story builds suspense around a succession of intimate betrayals as world-weary George Smiley, played with understated perfection by Gary Oldman, tries to figure out which of his paper-shuffling colleagues is shoveling secrets to the Soviets.
“For me, this is a film about loyalty and friendship that has the Cold War as backdrop,” said Alfredson, who wryly describes his movie’s visual template as “damp tweed.”
Real-Life Spy Games in The Man Nobody Knew
If Tinker, Tailor‘s unglamorous portrait of Cold War spycraft hews close to reality, recently released documentary The Man Nobody Knew flows directly from the strange exploits of William Colby, who led the CIA during one of its most maligned periods and testified before Congress about the spy agency’s “family jewels.”
Seen through the eyes of Colby’s filmmaker son Carl, the movie reveals the damage that a career as a spy can wreak on loved ones — and the questions that can linger.
“Did my father every really love anybody or were we just window dressing, a convenient cover?” Carl Colby asked, recounting his life abroad as the son of a spook in a phone interview with Wired.com.
“I remember walking down the steps of our house near the palace in Saigon and seeing my mom console a widow of a Vietnamese general who had been found in the river with chopsticks jammed into his ears and his lips sewn up. I really felt like, ‘This is not fun anymore.'”
Back in Washington, D.C., William Colby took charge of the CIA and came clean in 1975 about covert operations including assassination attempts, domestic surveillance, mind-control experiments and torture conducted in U.S. safe houses. Reviled by conservatives, William Colby left the CIA, divorced his wife, worked as a lawyer and became haunted by guilt over his neglect of a daughter who’d died young. Years later, he vanished for 13 days on a canoe trip; the guy who once ran the world’s most powerful intelligence operation was found dead in a Maryland river in 1996.
Post-Traumatic Spy Syndrome in Homeland
Showtime’s riveting spy series Homeland also deals with the devastating psychological effects of being a spy — or of being suspected of being one. The show focuses on U.S. Marine Nick Brody (played by Damian Lewis), who returns home after being held in Iraq for seven years by terrorists. CIA operative Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), convinced that Brody must have been “turned” during captivity, sets up barely legal surveillance cameras in the veteran’s house.
Maintaining an all-American hero facade for public consumption, Brody crouches in the corner of his bedroom for hours at a time after his wife and kids have left the house. He shoots a deer in the backyard with a handgun. He wakes up screaming from nightmares. The scars that crisscross his back clearly represent the least of Brody’s wounds.
Adapted from Israeli TV series Hatufim by 24 writer-producers Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, the show avoids the when-in-doubt-blow-something-up formula of their previous series to examine the interior havoc suffered by soldiers and spies trained in the science of concealment.
But Homeland doubles the dramatic ante by collapsing spy and soldier into a single antihero who is a ticking bomb. “We wanted to address the experience of veterans,” Gansa said in a statement. “The conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq is arguably the longest war in U.S. history. Members of the armed forces are struggling with post-traumatic stress and physical disabilities in record numbers.”
With Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol hitting theaters Dec. 21 and Skyfall bringing James Bond back to the big screen in 2012, there’s no doubt that the “cool spy” archetype will be refueled. Until then, The Man Nobody Knew, Homeland and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will fill the space in between explosions and car chases with spy stories that draw on deeper truths, crafting convincing portraits of spies as tight-lipped, tormented messes.
