Cinema Notes: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, A Dangerous Method

I’d been promising a friend my Blu-ray copy of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows for weeks. I finally remembered to bring it today as I was leaving to meet him for a viewing of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I bring this up because, after fully digesting the film, I was struck by how much it reminded me of Melville’s work, particularly Army of Shadows. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a genre film, but it operates with the same quiet demeanor and muted dramatics. The film is a great example of the dictum “it’s not what a film is about, but how it’s about it.” The narrative of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is no headier than any other serious genre effort, but it brings itself to a boil not with action or manipulative tensions, but with uncoiling motivations and minute subtleties. Alfredson’s adaption is a work of calculated restraint (with spot-on 70s aesthetics) that is centered by a singular, career-high performance from Gary Oldman. The end result is immensely satisfying, even if the film is, at times, mired by its own density. Condensing le Carré’s novel must have been a wonderful headache.

With A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg continues down his high cinema rabbit hole, delivering an absorbing feast of ideas, both cerebral and erotic. The film, based on screenwriter Christopher Hampton’s historical stage play, is a deliciously erudite chronicling of the relationships between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Vigo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). Cronenberg and Hampton present the story, as well as the nascency of psychoanalysis, through a bold choreography of intellectual and sexual encounters. (While I don’t envy the film’s exceptional actors having to learn their lines, I relished watching them deliver each fascinating conversation.) Cronenberg imbues the film with his familiar undercurrent of dry humor and with a remarkable—and surprisingly immediate—intimacy that eventually devastates. And he doesn’t distract with overly conspicuous cinematics, as this is first and foremost an actor’s piece. Fassbender (who’s had a very good year) and Mortensen delve brilliantly into their respective roles, but the film’s most courageous performance belongs to Knightley as the troubled (and brilliant) Spielrein.