Capone's Art-House Round Up with TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and David Cronenberg's A DANGEROUS METHOD!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a couple of films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
As I said my interview with Gary Oldman and director Tomas Alfredson (LET THE RIGHT ONE IN) earlier this week, the character of George Smiley has always reminded me of a description I once read of the butler character Anthony Hopkins played in REMAINS OF THE DAY--I may be paraphrasing--"When he enters a room, the room becomes more empty." Smiley (Oldman) has spent most of his career in British Intelligence as a professional observer, barely speaking, doesn't stand out, easy to forget.

In other words, he's the perfect spy. But he has spent many of his years playing the Number 2 man to Control (John Hurt), who opens the film sending one his operatives, Jim Prideasux (Mark Strong), into Hungary on a secret mission to retrieve the name of a mole high up in MI6. The mission goes horribly wrong, and the agent is shot down in cold blood, thus effectively ending the careers of both Control and Smiley, who is expected to go down with his captain.

After this preliminary introduction into TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, based on the classic novel by John le Carre, the film asks the intriguing question, what if a professional background player like Smiley is suddenly put in charge and brought to the foreground. For better or worse, the answer appears to be that we would learn what this man is truly made of, and thanks to a career-best performance by Oldman, that's exactly what happens.

When it is discovered that the story of a mole at MI6 may have some credibility to it and that Control had narrowed it down to four high-ranking officials (played by Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds and David Dencik) as well as Smiley, Smiley is brought back to MI6 to lead the investigation, along with the help of his new Number 2 man Peter Guillam (a fantastic turn by Benedict Cumberbatch), a younger agent who is the perfect melding of soothingly loyal and strikingly menacing, depending on what is required.

The details of the investigation isn't as important to the film as is the way Alfredson captures each character's essence with just a few choice traits, looks and moments. This is especially thrilling when watching Smiley emerge in Oldman's nuanced performance. And there are mysteries about every character that go well beyond which one is the mole. For example, we know that Smiley's wife has recently left him, and as the film unfolds and Alfredson jumps back and forth in time (thanks to some creative editing), we slowly uncover what happened between them.

But the film is also about about a dying bureaucracy during the height of the Cold War, the way the MI6 was so desperate for information about the Soviets that it was willing to throw caution to the wind, it's about how dated technology was slowly being replaced by newer models (not unlike what was happening with Old Guard of the agents themselves). There's a reason this story has stood the test of time, even in this condensed version, but this version is immaculately directed, shot, paced and acted, and to miss it would be a betrayal your whatever country you live in.

That being said, I wouldn't trust any critic's opinion on this film who hasn't seen the film at least twice, especially of they're down on the film. The first time you watch TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, you'll focus mainly on following the dense story; but it's the second time when the film's perfections really open themselves up to you, and you're able to sit back and soak in the totality of the work, especially the glorious performances. Once you've seen it that second time, well, then you'll want to watch it a third and fourth time just because you can.


A DANGEROUS METHOD
I don't have a clue how much of what is presented about the professional friendship between up-and-coming psychiatrist Carl Jung (played by Shame's Michael Fassbeder) and the more established mentor Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) is true in the new David Cronenberg film A DANGEROUS METHOD, and I don't care. I was too transfixed simply listening to their theories spelled out, take shape, and discounted or embraced to care. Fassbender and Mortensen play these men of medicine and letters talking about sex so perfectly that even the film's flaws (there are several) are fairly easy to overlook.

The deepest problem with the film is not the performance of Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a deeply troubled patient who comes to Jung with hopes of being cured and eventually taking up his line of work, perhaps as an assistant. It's the way the character is written that doesn't work as well as it needs to. Knightley is actually somewhat terrifying as Sabina, whose affectations cause her to distort her face and body grotesquely. After discouragement from Freud and encouragement from a somewhat bohemian patient Otto Gross (the truly mental Vincent Cassel from BLACK SWAN), the married Jung begins an affair with Sabina, which include some of her sexual proclivities such as S&M fantasies.

A DANGEROUS METHOD winds through the relationship between the two psychiatrists and Sabina, a coming together and eventual parting of the ways that fractured this branch of medicine from this point forward. I love the way Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton (ATONEMENT) weave in the changing times and locations (Vienna and Zurich, soon to be plunged into World War I). The fact that the more renowned Freud is sometimes treated like a lesser citizen because he is Jewish also factors into their relationship peripherally.

Fans of Cronenberg's more overtly horrific or disturbing works may not see much of his touch in this movie, but if you look hard enough, the birthplace of some of his best psycho-sexual obsessions are right there ready to jump out at you. The film is occasionally too dry even for its subject, and it sometimes struggles when Fassbender and Mortensen aren't front and center, but overall A DANGEROUS METHOD has enough going for it to give it a moderate recommendation. Go for the sex talk; stay for the rest of the discussion.

-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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