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trinityvixenI'm lumping together the two "actually good" categories of movies I saw in the theater because, really, after posting about the so-bad-they're-brilliant movies, I've just lost a lot of the oomph to keep going. So here we are, two weeks into 2012, finishing off my remembrances of 2011.
2011's Actually Good Movies
Summer Wars - An anime about gaming community members pooling resources to defeat evil in cyberspace while, in real life, a family comes together to support their niece/daughter/cousin's new boyfriend. It's adorable, sweet, and not as prone to the excesses of anime-isms as I remember from those years I watched nothing but. What a great way to revisit anime. I needs must do it again.
True Grit - Not expecting to like this one as much as I did, but the girl in it was fantastic, and the story, while weak in parts, carries through in the end. An elegiac western about the death of the west. Seems rather appropriate. I wanted not to like this one, as I've yet to forgive the Coen brothers for ruining No Country for Old Men forty minutes from its end, but I couldn't help myself.
The Adjustment Bureau - It's a shame this was under-advertised. It's a sweet romance that also throws in a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy elements that are neither too hand-wavy nor over-explained. And Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, despite being preternaturally good-looking and slightly exotic in their careers, play down-to-Earth people you want to succeed and to have the adventures they're having. After reading the story it's based on, the movie improves the pacing and gives the conclusion some satisfaction. Philip K. Dick was an ideas man, but he leans too heavily on the sudden/shock ending to make effective drama.
Hanna - A chilling entry in a recent spate of small-girl-kicks-a-lot-of-ass genre, Hanna is absorbing. Saorsie Ronan possesses the role utterly, as both killing machine and naif discovering family (and, maybe, love) for the first time. Again, performances are top-rate all around without diminishing or distracting from the incredibly creepy vibe of the film. Hanna is a goddamned nightmare killer in a way that is more disturbing both for how how brutally real and unreal it is at the same time. Unlike, say, Hit Girl in Kick-Ass, Hanna is neither cartoonish (thus relieving the audience for complicity in accepting her deeds) nor redeemed into normalcy (it's hard to say, given the direction of the film, that this girl, even if she never kills again, will ever be normal or will ever have the conscience to want to try). This one really affected me, though I cannot recommend it to everyone, given the subject matter. Proceed at your own risk.
Thor - This gets put on a list with Oscar movies and movies with pretensions of grandeur because it was, like them, actually good without being too overwrought. I enjoyed this way more than I'd ever thought possible, given the character it was meant to be highlighting. Silly at times, yes, but overall grandly, fondly dramatic and impossibly walking a line between ridiculing and exhorting its subject, which, given how prone the central character is to ridicule, is even more impressive. I appreciated the inverse approach towards creating the hero character--starting Thor off as fully come into his own power and breaking him down such that he becomes a man possessed of power and responsible with it--even though it felt, at times, a little rushed. (Which is an odd thing to say about a two-hour-plus movie, but there you are.) And it didn't hurt that the star was easy on the eyes, as I'm sure I might have mentioned once or twice.
Bridesmaids - If you see this only for the funny, you'll be in for a treat. It's quite hysterical without completely demeaning the women in it. (Except for the extended shit joke. That was not fun nor was it necessary to bring in male audiences. Jesus.) What really sold it for me, especially last year, when my best friend was getting married, was the underlying acknowledgment that friendships can and do change and it can be so incredibly hard to accept that and make peace with it. It had to be sold as a raunchy comedy to get made, but it was there.
Cowboys & Aliens - Wow, am I going to get lambasted for putting this here. Okay, it had some ooky and predictably racist moments, but I thought it was pretty enjoyable. It's not True Grit, but it employed some Western cliches in new directions, and there's never not going to be a time I don't want to see a movie that features Daniel Craig kicking ass and Harrison Ford wearing a fedora. I won't defend it overmuch, but I will say that it's worth your time and is actually a lot more serious and sensitive about the material than the joke title would indicate.
50/50 - As with Bridesmaids, the only way to make a movie that people will see with serious shit going down is to give it the veneer of raunch. Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks sleep-deprived and stressed while still putting on a good face in most of his roles, and it adds to the sadness of his character, suffering from cancer, in this movie. Because you can see and understand that what he needs and should have is a good freak out about how really shit this situation is, but he's so stuck on not letting others get depressed about it that he refuses to accept that "weakness" in himself. Seth Rogen, for all his boorish behavior, is the perfect foil in that he wants desperately to help his friend but has no idea how to do it. They're both clueless in different ways and all you want to do is shake them. Despite that, you still really pull for both of them.
The Thing - A passable remake that cannot, despite some terrific CGI, hold a candle to the original, and that, despite this shortcoming, is probably better than most sci-fi/horror I've seen in a while. What set The Thing apart was how intelligent the humans dealing with the monster were. They figured out not to let people out of their sight, figured out how to test for this monster's presence with their extremely limited equipment, and did their best to stop it at great personal cost. The remake lost something in its switch from creature effects to CGI (though, again, the latter were pretty damn good), but it kept up a lot of the intelligence of the heroes of the original. The heroes of this movie--who are supposed to be the members of the camp discovered in the original--even have an entirely different method for sniffing out replicated people which is fiendishly simple. And, yes, it was fun to look for Easter eggs referring back to the first film.
Mission: Imposible: Ghost Protocol - The first one will always be the best, but this was pretty damn entertaining. I like the dynamic of the new team, with Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg (and, uh, the woman; God, this series is a FeminismFAIL!). There's a little bit of man-pain pathos that I appreciated, too. The action is well-directed, and it doesn't feel entirely like it's lurching between set pieces like a lot of post-Bay action movies do. The stunts are, for the first time I can remember, of a sort where you wonder how in the fuck they did them. I'm referring, of course, to the scene of Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Kalifa. It's the sort of vertigo-inducing shot that ratchets up tension in a way you cannot fight. I will so watch the special features for how they did this because it was an amazing series of shots and about the only stunt that lived up to the title of the franchise.
So those were the movies I deemed good, subjectively or objectively, and you're free to disagree with me as you please. I don't have real dogs in any of those fights, though I suspect I won't have to defend myself overmuch. This next list, though, are movies that I foresee going into heavy rotation in future--go-to new classics and favorites. Be gentle with me on these?
2011's New Favorites:
The King's Speech - I am usually wary of obvious Oscar-bait movies like this one (with good reason, as it then went on to win the Oscar), but I'm also a sucker for British period dramas, especially those as deal with WWII. The British will never not be exceptional for what they endured and overcame in that period. Every time it's used in fiction, it gets to me. (Doctor Who has used this time period incredibly well in both the Ninth and Eleventh Doctor's stories. Check out "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" two-parter or the most recent Christmas special for some goodies.) So, yes, the film is asking you to cheer on a stodgy man of extreme privilege at a time when all others are really suffering, but he's doing it for them so that makes it okay enough to enjoy the hell out of.
It helps that Colin Firth, always exceptional, and Geoffrey Rush played off of each other in a way that enhanced their already considerable skills. And kudos to Helena Bonham-Carter for her understated performance as the queen. Touching, fun, funny, and ultimately uplifting, it's definitely mushy, but the substance beneath and the performances throughout give it a steely backbone which doesn't sag under the schmaltz.
Kung-Fu Panda 2 - The first one is only okay, an average romp through the Dreamworks machine. But the sequel is both moving and upsetting, in the way that great art ought to be. And it is great art. Not only are the paper-like animation sequences breathtakingly beautiful (think of that great animated sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I), they tell a story that involves you, immerses you naturally and fully into this world of talking animals that do kung fu. Perhaps the most delicate touch comes with the message conveyed about family. There is always a message in these "kids' films," and it's usually so heavy-handed you have to cringe. In this, Po's father, a goose, is so heart-breaking in his concern for his son; his son may be an anointed warrior-panda, but he's still his son and he never stops worrying. It's such a natural and underwrought example of love and their family interaction is so honest, it reminded me of the best of Miyazaki, no mean feat for any animation studio, Ghibli included.
I have to also give props here to Gary Oldman for playing a psychotic albino peacock and for the animators perfectly capturing his crazy eyes in animation! I mean it: you will believe that psychotic albino peacock is Gary Oldman AND VICE VERSA. Between this and another new favorite of mine from 2011, it was a year to totally love all aspects of Gary Oldman's more than plentiful skills.
Captain America: The First Avenger - See my comments above to take, for granted, my love of underdog WWII movies. As with Thor, this property required a delicacy in presentation, perhaps even more so than with Thor, because its problematic hero is interacting with reality in a way that Thor never has. Captain America, the comic book hero, has a complicated past as a jingoistic figure, who reflected, at the time of his creation, the growing frustration of the authors with the US for staying out of the war. Once the US was in the war, it was hardly less of a propaganda character, and, I'll bet, all the more awkward for it. I think of what it was like for the comics when 9/11 happened and how hard it was to draw up comics reacting to or dealing with that fallout when, if Earth's Mightiest Heroes had been around in reality, we like to think they could have stopped such a thing. I bet there was no small resentment of/wish fulfillment by Captain America in WWII for much the same reason--why fight and get trenchfoot and frostbite and probably die far from home when some steroidal homo-superior can do it all for you?
Given what the film was going up against, it skirted the line between patriotic blather and knowing cynicism to come out the other side, sincere without being propagandist. There were two decisions that made this movie work. One was to make the war between Captain American and Hydra parallel without totally overlapping the human-versus-human real war. (Except for one scene where the Cap tries to rally troops, which is, pointedly and purposefully, awkward.) The other was to hire Chris Evans who manages to sell Steve Rogers as dedicated to doing what is right without being a complete dolt or a total goody-goody. Like the rest of the film, he stays on the right side of sincere-but-knowing, and you stay right there with him. So, yes, it's a total white-wash of difficult history, and you'll feel a little guilty for being so innocently wrapped up in it, but you enjoy it all the same.
Crazy Stupid Love - There's so much bittersweetness to this film, you hurt for everybody, even people who don't "deserve" it. Nobody is an out-and-out villain, with the possible exception of Kevin Bacon. I was a little less pleased with the one kid waging romantic war against the wishes of his babysitter, but the twin romantic pairings at the heart of the movie, Stevel Carell and Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, are treated very gently and very honestly, for all their imperfections. It helps, too, that the climax is one of the most hilarious sequences of mistakes that has ever been committed to film. The movie is softly amusing in the heart-string-pulling way up until then; when I got to the climax of the film in the theater, everyone, myself included, burst out laughing unto the point of tears and didn't stop for ten minutes. Very fun, though a little too sexist to be entirely okay. It's worth supressing the outrage for, though, so I'll happily watch it again.
Drive - Thrilling. No other word for it. The soundtrack is intensely 1980s, in a dangerous and predatory way, with the thumping artificial bass driving you along as surely as a heartbeat. Ryan Gosling's silent reserve of strength spills out into awful (and awe-filling) action and violence, making the tender exchanges of earlier parts even more disquieting somehow. The violence is more frightening for how nonchalant it is. Albert Brooks, of all people will scare the bejeezus out of you with his cheerful indifference to horrible things he does. His is the most exquisite rage, the kind that kvetches mightily outside of the moment, but which is ruthlessly efficient when the time comes. Ryan Gosling's character is the inverse--exploding, as much as he is able to do, when he is finally pushed past the tolerance of his superhuman equinimity. I was completely riveted for the entire film, and I wouldn't hesitate to suggest this to you all, minus, again, those as are squeamish about violence. Like Hanna, the violence is so pedestrian as to be made ever more monstrous--worse than any theatrical spurting of blood in how devastatingly real it seems, in equal measures gross and morbidly fascinating.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - You'd never know this was cut down considerably from a much longer miniseries, given the steady, measured pacing. It's sort of the opposite in tempo from Drive, yet it was also effortlessly compelling and thrilling. Gary Oldman's measured, toned-down performance deserves all the kudos it has received. His speech about Karla will undoubtedly be used in his presentation at the Oscars, since, like Drive, Tinker, Tailor has a tight-lipped hero at its center and, therefore, despite a career-high performance, has very few actual lines of dialogue on which to trade awards. Aside from his turn as Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman films, I've never seen Gary Oldman so turned down yet simultaneously captivating. I love him in all his ranting and raving glory, don't get me wrong (see my comments vis a vis Kung Fu Panda 2), but you appreciate a true master when you see him as George Smiley.
All the performances are all so lived-in that you don't need hours of backstory to believe them--to feel them. You meet one character's significant other for all of three seconds, but the exchange between them speaks of a life lived together and the consquences of being a spy on that relationship. You don't even really ever meet Gary Oldman's wife, but the palpable effect she's had on his life pre- and post-retirement, leaves this echoing ache, writ large in the wrinkles over his over-large glasses. In less devastating areas, you have the fussy busy-body, so sure of himself unto the point of paranoia, played well despite the brevity of scenes in which he features by Toby Jones. Colin Firth plays against type as something of a hopeless letch. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy bring the steel-will and iron-fist of the next generation of spies, learning from their masters with preternatural patience.
2011's Actually Good Movies
Summer Wars - An anime about gaming community members pooling resources to defeat evil in cyberspace while, in real life, a family comes together to support their niece/daughter/cousin's new boyfriend. It's adorable, sweet, and not as prone to the excesses of anime-isms as I remember from those years I watched nothing but. What a great way to revisit anime. I needs must do it again.
True Grit - Not expecting to like this one as much as I did, but the girl in it was fantastic, and the story, while weak in parts, carries through in the end. An elegiac western about the death of the west. Seems rather appropriate. I wanted not to like this one, as I've yet to forgive the Coen brothers for ruining No Country for Old Men forty minutes from its end, but I couldn't help myself.
The Adjustment Bureau - It's a shame this was under-advertised. It's a sweet romance that also throws in a bunch of sci-fi/fantasy elements that are neither too hand-wavy nor over-explained. And Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, despite being preternaturally good-looking and slightly exotic in their careers, play down-to-Earth people you want to succeed and to have the adventures they're having. After reading the story it's based on, the movie improves the pacing and gives the conclusion some satisfaction. Philip K. Dick was an ideas man, but he leans too heavily on the sudden/shock ending to make effective drama.
Hanna - A chilling entry in a recent spate of small-girl-kicks-a-lot-of-ass genre, Hanna is absorbing. Saorsie Ronan possesses the role utterly, as both killing machine and naif discovering family (and, maybe, love) for the first time. Again, performances are top-rate all around without diminishing or distracting from the incredibly creepy vibe of the film. Hanna is a goddamned nightmare killer in a way that is more disturbing both for how how brutally real and unreal it is at the same time. Unlike, say, Hit Girl in Kick-Ass, Hanna is neither cartoonish (thus relieving the audience for complicity in accepting her deeds) nor redeemed into normalcy (it's hard to say, given the direction of the film, that this girl, even if she never kills again, will ever be normal or will ever have the conscience to want to try). This one really affected me, though I cannot recommend it to everyone, given the subject matter. Proceed at your own risk.
Thor - This gets put on a list with Oscar movies and movies with pretensions of grandeur because it was, like them, actually good without being too overwrought. I enjoyed this way more than I'd ever thought possible, given the character it was meant to be highlighting. Silly at times, yes, but overall grandly, fondly dramatic and impossibly walking a line between ridiculing and exhorting its subject, which, given how prone the central character is to ridicule, is even more impressive. I appreciated the inverse approach towards creating the hero character--starting Thor off as fully come into his own power and breaking him down such that he becomes a man possessed of power and responsible with it--even though it felt, at times, a little rushed. (Which is an odd thing to say about a two-hour-plus movie, but there you are.) And it didn't hurt that the star was easy on the eyes, as I'm sure I might have mentioned once or twice.
Bridesmaids - If you see this only for the funny, you'll be in for a treat. It's quite hysterical without completely demeaning the women in it. (Except for the extended shit joke. That was not fun nor was it necessary to bring in male audiences. Jesus.) What really sold it for me, especially last year, when my best friend was getting married, was the underlying acknowledgment that friendships can and do change and it can be so incredibly hard to accept that and make peace with it. It had to be sold as a raunchy comedy to get made, but it was there.
Cowboys & Aliens - Wow, am I going to get lambasted for putting this here. Okay, it had some ooky and predictably racist moments, but I thought it was pretty enjoyable. It's not True Grit, but it employed some Western cliches in new directions, and there's never not going to be a time I don't want to see a movie that features Daniel Craig kicking ass and Harrison Ford wearing a fedora. I won't defend it overmuch, but I will say that it's worth your time and is actually a lot more serious and sensitive about the material than the joke title would indicate.
50/50 - As with Bridesmaids, the only way to make a movie that people will see with serious shit going down is to give it the veneer of raunch. Joseph Gordon-Levitt looks sleep-deprived and stressed while still putting on a good face in most of his roles, and it adds to the sadness of his character, suffering from cancer, in this movie. Because you can see and understand that what he needs and should have is a good freak out about how really shit this situation is, but he's so stuck on not letting others get depressed about it that he refuses to accept that "weakness" in himself. Seth Rogen, for all his boorish behavior, is the perfect foil in that he wants desperately to help his friend but has no idea how to do it. They're both clueless in different ways and all you want to do is shake them. Despite that, you still really pull for both of them.
The Thing - A passable remake that cannot, despite some terrific CGI, hold a candle to the original, and that, despite this shortcoming, is probably better than most sci-fi/horror I've seen in a while. What set The Thing apart was how intelligent the humans dealing with the monster were. They figured out not to let people out of their sight, figured out how to test for this monster's presence with their extremely limited equipment, and did their best to stop it at great personal cost. The remake lost something in its switch from creature effects to CGI (though, again, the latter were pretty damn good), but it kept up a lot of the intelligence of the heroes of the original. The heroes of this movie--who are supposed to be the members of the camp discovered in the original--even have an entirely different method for sniffing out replicated people which is fiendishly simple. And, yes, it was fun to look for Easter eggs referring back to the first film.
Mission: Imposible: Ghost Protocol - The first one will always be the best, but this was pretty damn entertaining. I like the dynamic of the new team, with Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg (and, uh, the woman; God, this series is a FeminismFAIL!). There's a little bit of man-pain pathos that I appreciated, too. The action is well-directed, and it doesn't feel entirely like it's lurching between set pieces like a lot of post-Bay action movies do. The stunts are, for the first time I can remember, of a sort where you wonder how in the fuck they did them. I'm referring, of course, to the scene of Tom Cruise climbing the Burj Kalifa. It's the sort of vertigo-inducing shot that ratchets up tension in a way you cannot fight. I will so watch the special features for how they did this because it was an amazing series of shots and about the only stunt that lived up to the title of the franchise.
So those were the movies I deemed good, subjectively or objectively, and you're free to disagree with me as you please. I don't have real dogs in any of those fights, though I suspect I won't have to defend myself overmuch. This next list, though, are movies that I foresee going into heavy rotation in future--go-to new classics and favorites. Be gentle with me on these?
2011's New Favorites:
The King's Speech - I am usually wary of obvious Oscar-bait movies like this one (with good reason, as it then went on to win the Oscar), but I'm also a sucker for British period dramas, especially those as deal with WWII. The British will never not be exceptional for what they endured and overcame in that period. Every time it's used in fiction, it gets to me. (Doctor Who has used this time period incredibly well in both the Ninth and Eleventh Doctor's stories. Check out "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances" two-parter or the most recent Christmas special for some goodies.) So, yes, the film is asking you to cheer on a stodgy man of extreme privilege at a time when all others are really suffering, but he's doing it for them so that makes it okay enough to enjoy the hell out of.
It helps that Colin Firth, always exceptional, and Geoffrey Rush played off of each other in a way that enhanced their already considerable skills. And kudos to Helena Bonham-Carter for her understated performance as the queen. Touching, fun, funny, and ultimately uplifting, it's definitely mushy, but the substance beneath and the performances throughout give it a steely backbone which doesn't sag under the schmaltz.
Kung-Fu Panda 2 - The first one is only okay, an average romp through the Dreamworks machine. But the sequel is both moving and upsetting, in the way that great art ought to be. And it is great art. Not only are the paper-like animation sequences breathtakingly beautiful (think of that great animated sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I), they tell a story that involves you, immerses you naturally and fully into this world of talking animals that do kung fu. Perhaps the most delicate touch comes with the message conveyed about family. There is always a message in these "kids' films," and it's usually so heavy-handed you have to cringe. In this, Po's father, a goose, is so heart-breaking in his concern for his son; his son may be an anointed warrior-panda, but he's still his son and he never stops worrying. It's such a natural and underwrought example of love and their family interaction is so honest, it reminded me of the best of Miyazaki, no mean feat for any animation studio, Ghibli included.
I have to also give props here to Gary Oldman for playing a psychotic albino peacock and for the animators perfectly capturing his crazy eyes in animation! I mean it: you will believe that psychotic albino peacock is Gary Oldman AND VICE VERSA. Between this and another new favorite of mine from 2011, it was a year to totally love all aspects of Gary Oldman's more than plentiful skills.
Captain America: The First Avenger - See my comments above to take, for granted, my love of underdog WWII movies. As with Thor, this property required a delicacy in presentation, perhaps even more so than with Thor, because its problematic hero is interacting with reality in a way that Thor never has. Captain America, the comic book hero, has a complicated past as a jingoistic figure, who reflected, at the time of his creation, the growing frustration of the authors with the US for staying out of the war. Once the US was in the war, it was hardly less of a propaganda character, and, I'll bet, all the more awkward for it. I think of what it was like for the comics when 9/11 happened and how hard it was to draw up comics reacting to or dealing with that fallout when, if Earth's Mightiest Heroes had been around in reality, we like to think they could have stopped such a thing. I bet there was no small resentment of/wish fulfillment by Captain America in WWII for much the same reason--why fight and get trenchfoot and frostbite and probably die far from home when some steroidal homo-superior can do it all for you?
Given what the film was going up against, it skirted the line between patriotic blather and knowing cynicism to come out the other side, sincere without being propagandist. There were two decisions that made this movie work. One was to make the war between Captain American and Hydra parallel without totally overlapping the human-versus-human real war. (Except for one scene where the Cap tries to rally troops, which is, pointedly and purposefully, awkward.) The other was to hire Chris Evans who manages to sell Steve Rogers as dedicated to doing what is right without being a complete dolt or a total goody-goody. Like the rest of the film, he stays on the right side of sincere-but-knowing, and you stay right there with him. So, yes, it's a total white-wash of difficult history, and you'll feel a little guilty for being so innocently wrapped up in it, but you enjoy it all the same.
Crazy Stupid Love - There's so much bittersweetness to this film, you hurt for everybody, even people who don't "deserve" it. Nobody is an out-and-out villain, with the possible exception of Kevin Bacon. I was a little less pleased with the one kid waging romantic war against the wishes of his babysitter, but the twin romantic pairings at the heart of the movie, Stevel Carell and Julianne Moore, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, are treated very gently and very honestly, for all their imperfections. It helps, too, that the climax is one of the most hilarious sequences of mistakes that has ever been committed to film. The movie is softly amusing in the heart-string-pulling way up until then; when I got to the climax of the film in the theater, everyone, myself included, burst out laughing unto the point of tears and didn't stop for ten minutes. Very fun, though a little too sexist to be entirely okay. It's worth supressing the outrage for, though, so I'll happily watch it again.
Drive - Thrilling. No other word for it. The soundtrack is intensely 1980s, in a dangerous and predatory way, with the thumping artificial bass driving you along as surely as a heartbeat. Ryan Gosling's silent reserve of strength spills out into awful (and awe-filling) action and violence, making the tender exchanges of earlier parts even more disquieting somehow. The violence is more frightening for how nonchalant it is. Albert Brooks, of all people will scare the bejeezus out of you with his cheerful indifference to horrible things he does. His is the most exquisite rage, the kind that kvetches mightily outside of the moment, but which is ruthlessly efficient when the time comes. Ryan Gosling's character is the inverse--exploding, as much as he is able to do, when he is finally pushed past the tolerance of his superhuman equinimity. I was completely riveted for the entire film, and I wouldn't hesitate to suggest this to you all, minus, again, those as are squeamish about violence. Like Hanna, the violence is so pedestrian as to be made ever more monstrous--worse than any theatrical spurting of blood in how devastatingly real it seems, in equal measures gross and morbidly fascinating.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - You'd never know this was cut down considerably from a much longer miniseries, given the steady, measured pacing. It's sort of the opposite in tempo from Drive, yet it was also effortlessly compelling and thrilling. Gary Oldman's measured, toned-down performance deserves all the kudos it has received. His speech about Karla will undoubtedly be used in his presentation at the Oscars, since, like Drive, Tinker, Tailor has a tight-lipped hero at its center and, therefore, despite a career-high performance, has very few actual lines of dialogue on which to trade awards. Aside from his turn as Commissioner Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman films, I've never seen Gary Oldman so turned down yet simultaneously captivating. I love him in all his ranting and raving glory, don't get me wrong (see my comments vis a vis Kung Fu Panda 2), but you appreciate a true master when you see him as George Smiley.
All the performances are all so lived-in that you don't need hours of backstory to believe them--to feel them. You meet one character's significant other for all of three seconds, but the exchange between them speaks of a life lived together and the consquences of being a spy on that relationship. You don't even really ever meet Gary Oldman's wife, but the palpable effect she's had on his life pre- and post-retirement, leaves this echoing ache, writ large in the wrinkles over his over-large glasses. In less devastating areas, you have the fussy busy-body, so sure of himself unto the point of paranoia, played well despite the brevity of scenes in which he features by Toby Jones. Colin Firth plays against type as something of a hopeless letch. Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hardy bring the steel-will and iron-fist of the next generation of spies, learning from their masters with preternatural patience.
