Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Drive; Crazy Stupid Love; What's Your Number?
A sound somewhere between a muffled cheer and a collective sigh of relief could be heard echoing around the hushed corridors of the "British film industry" last Tuesday when the brilliant Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011, Optimum, 15) received at least some of the recognition that it so richly deserved at the Oscar nominations.
Having been first snubbed by the unaccountable bozos of the increasingly embarrassing Golden Globes and then feted by the far more discerning voters of Bafta, Tomas Alfredson's low-key masterpiece walked away from round one of the Academy Awards with three significant nominations to its name: best actor for Gary Oldman (amazingly, his first sniff of Oscar glory); best music for Alberto Iglesias; and a posthumous adapted screenplay nod for Bridget O'Connor, whose partner in crime, Peter Straughan, deserves to carry off the statuettes on both their behalfs come awards night.
That the Swedish Alfredson should not have been specifically recognised too is clearly a disappointment, but in a year when We Need to Talk About Kevin has been overlooked entirely by the most high-profile American awards ceremonies, Tinker Tailor's Oscar nominations are something of a reason to be cheerful.
The genius of Alfredson's film is that despite the fabulously evocative period detail (you can smell the stale cigarette smoke lingering in the yellowing wallpaper) and the pervasive cold war dread, this adaptation of John le Carré's well-loved bestseller is not about spies at all. Just as Let the Right One In presented a surreptitious study of repressed childhood anger disguised in the garb of a neo-gothic vampire tale, so Tinker Tailor buries its central theme of male distrust, duplicity and anxious misidentification within the labyrinthine twists of an international counter-intelligence yarn.
While the seven-part 70s TV series had the time to unravel and unpick every intertwining plot strand, O'Connor and Straughan's slimmed-down screenplay remains altogether more allusive on the spy-v-spy mechanics. Instead, we watch a parade of variously uncomfortable misfit men dupe, lie and habitually deceive one another, often with no clear purpose or end in sight.
At the heart of it all is Oldman's immeasurable Smiley, cast out into the wilderness by the politics of fate, now struggling to reassemble the fractured pieces of a life he never really understood. Unlike so many who capture the attention of awards voters, Oldman offers a performance of rare control and understatement, reducing momentous revelations to the merest flicker of an eyelid, a faint ripple of a neck muscle, a barely noticeable tightening of the jaw.
All this tiny ballet is beautifully captured by Hoyte van Hoytema's surveillance cinematography and pickled within the aspic perfection of Maria Djurkovic's effectively oppressive production design. DVD extras include commentary from Oldman and Alfredson and an interview with le Carré, with Blu-ray discs adding contributions from Straughan and co-stars Colin Firth and Tom Hardy. Breathtaking.
While there was triple cause for celebration in the Tinker Tailorcamp, the makers of the Bafta best film contender Drive (2011, Icon, 18) had to make do with a single Oscar nomination for sound editing. It's perhaps unsurprising that Cannes festival prize-winner Nic Winding Refn should find his excellent upmarket exploitation picture thusly shunned by the American Academy – this is exactly the kind of unashamedly "unworthy" effort that is traditionally sidestepped by Oscar voters in favour of more socially conscious fare such as The Help. Never mind – this heady cocktail of tension, intrigue and explosive pedal-to-the-metal violence is in little need of respectable garlands.
Drawing equal inspiration from the throwback narrative templates of The Driver and Le Samouraï and the modern grind-house aesthetic of Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, Refn's shiny gem is a slick, stylish, quasi-existential thriller, which purrs like a V-8 and roars like a Straight-6. Ryan Gosling resembles a latterday James Dean as the match-chewing, titular gun for hire whose untouchability is threatened by Carey Mulligan's vulnerable allure. Adapted with high-performance efficiency by screenwriter Hossein Amini from James Sallis's pulp-fiction source, Drive is a real guilty pleasure, with its glistening surfaces, threatening noises and intoxicating musical soundtrack.
The only downside to its arrival on the DVD shelves (replete with Refn Q&A) is the fact that, as in cinemas, it ships up day and date with another altogether less likable Ryan Gosling vehicle, Crazy Stupid Love (2011, Warner, 12). An increasingly irksome Steve Carell "relationship comedy" (stop me if you've heard this one), this disappointingly dreary dirge casts Gosling as a slimy ladies' man who makes it his mission to get a middle-aged lunk laid. Heavy-handed sex-farce japes aside, what is most dispiriting about this somewhat smug and ultimately ill-advisedly moralising mess is the lousy hand it serves to talented performers such as Marisa Tomei, Emma Stone and Julianne Moore.
At least Anna Faris gets a fair crack of the whip in What's Your Number? (2011, Fox, 15), in which she plays a disenchanted singleton who learns from a magazine article that her chances of marriage would be impaired by any further liaisons and therefore resolves to revisit all her former boyfriends in search of Mr Right. It's a clunking plot contrivance that runs out of steam long before the movie has run its course and the script has nothing of the ballsy charm of Bridesmaids (which caught a couple of bouquets at the Oscar nominations – hooray!). But Faris gets to keep changeable cheesecake Chris Evans out of the centre-stage spotlight and remind us that there's nothing essentially male about bawdy scattershot humour.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/29/mark-kermode-dvd-round-up
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