This film's title gets two (pesky) songs stuck in my head, Dandelion by The Rolling Stones and the old barbershop standard My Coney Island Baby. My mother used to sing the whole rhyme to me and my sibs while counting the buttons on our dress shirts, stopping (based on some rule I now forget) and determining which of the roles we "were". To top it all off, my sister actually watched the original miniseries one summer while we were growing up, flagging this version as a possible point of commonality between us (a bit of a rarity, these days). So TTSS has been nagging at me since I saw it a few weeks ago.
Beyond the stellar ensemble casting, intimate performances and exquisitely claustrophobic mise-en-scene that brought the Circus to life, TTSS offers a valuable opportunity: A reminder that British cinema is foreign cinema. It's harder to see here than in other foreign films. We've been fed most of the cast for decades, many in non-accented roles. And this being a period piece further muddies the water (though Gilliam's epic Brazil put a hyper-Brit, hyper-bureaucracy into the cult consciousness forever ago, and the source material, as it were, is well displayed in TTSS). Toss in the fact that there are swaths of Canada that require subtitles, and you've got about as subtle a genre piece as you can find (subtlety being an indicator of the film's foreign status, of course. Sorry Hollywood).
There are Others all over this film, and it is they who give the nod to the outsider in every Yank moviegoer. Gay men, spies, Scotsmen, women in the government--there's a social maze ancient and twisted for the characters to navigate, one so intricate that the audience might not even notice as we stride right over the top of it, from our modern, American perspectives.
But those of us who can sit in the theater and say, "Wow, England's really different," are actually invited in. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an outsider's film, for them, by them. And the moral of the story is that being an outsider hurts, really costs, but, hey, you aren't as alone as you think. Not a bad feeling to walk away with for the price of popcorn and a pint.
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