Tinker Trailer Soldier Spy

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been met with almost unanimous critical acclaim and rightly so. It's an enthralling piece of work which masterfully adapts the complexities of le Carré's novel to the screen. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is directed by Tomas Alfredson who brought us 2008's refreshingly gritty and surprisingly heart warming interpretation of the vampire myth Let the Right One in. Alfredson adopts a similar visual style to his previous efforts within his latest feature, minimalistic and formal framing paired against a very muted grey colour pallet. This creates a sterility and coldness to the cameras gaze which is the perfect accompaniment to the calm and emotionally suppressed scrutiny with which the protagonist Smiley, played by the ever outstanding Gary Oldman, carries out his investigation. Whilst the narrative is difficult to follow, if you concentrate and stick with it, you will find it an ultimately rewarding experience. I do not however intend to write another glowing report of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's many merits, you can find plenty of those elsewhere which would undoubtedly provide you with a more eloquent account of the film than I could. Instead I wish to discuss something which struck me about the film prior to viewing it- the trailer.

A film's trailer is essentially a cinematic equivalent to a book's blurb. A blurb will usually provide an introductory impression of plot, narrative content and genre whilst detailing some critical opinion and background on the author. A film trailer is exactly the same only displayed through audio-visuals. The key difference is that a book's blurb is a piece of prose separate from the text itself whereas a film's trailer is comprised almost exclusively of content from within the film, and therein lies the problem with the modern day movie trailer. Far, far too often I will see a trailer for a film and through it be able to piece together exactly what happens because they simply give away too much in an effort of advertising how exciting/scary/funny/moving it's going to be. 

For me trailers for modern thriller and horror films are interesting to pair off against one another, both genres arguably rely on tension, mystery and violence as their strongest generic pleasures. With this in mind it is clear that the film trailer's of these two genres try their very best to advertise these elements the most strongly so will often litter the trailer's content with the most tense, shocking and violent scenes of the film. While I understand this strategy it seems irrevocably stupid as it gives audiences too strong an expectation of the films content in a genre which should strive to surprise, disturb and subvert audience assumption as much as possible to engender it's desired effects. A recent example of this which springs to mind is for the pseudo-documentary horror Grave Encounters, the trailer of which can be found below:

Despite the fact that the protagonist's neck is longer than his legs the first 50 seconds of this trailer do pretty much exactly what they should-providing an idea of the narrative framework and giving an impression of the creepy kind of stuff which goes on in the abandoned hospital without committing anything of importance away. If we can try to ignore the fact that their 'sophisticated ghost hunting equipment' is simply fluorescent pritt stick on the walls, blue lights and cameras with a flash function the rest of the trailers content foolishly reveals what are clearly key, climactic centre pieces of the movie. Most notably we see men flying along corridors shitting their pants, women whose skin has been mutilated (presumably by a ghost with a knife), ghosts throwing their beds around the room in a tantrum and one of their mates at the end whose face starts melting into some kind of black chasm which scares her friends. It's all very tiresome and reduces this ghost movie to simply being another string of predictable jumps and bumps in the night half of which we saw in the trailer.

Another example which drew my attention as being of particularly poor execution was for the upcoming The Thing prequel where you actually see at least 4 of the crew being infected by the alien-removing any tension and sense of paranoia from a plot whose foundations rest solely on those very things. Having grown accustomed to this sort of nonsense it came as a breath of fresh air when I sat down in the cinema a month or so ago and saw the superbly well constructed Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy promo, as displayed below:

All that is revealed about the film's plot is that Oldman's character Smiley has been tasked with discovering who the Russian mole is within British intelligence. The trailer's utilisation of fade to blacks and the disconnection of continuity between shots leaves room for the audience to attempt to fill in the gaps between them. Unlike the Grave Encounters trailer at no point are we given anything that resembles a segment of a scene from the film, more often than not simply 2 or 3 second close ups of  characters staring suspiciously off screen. The trailer holds each character under as much suspicion as the film itself does and through this the audience are tasked with deciphering the mystery before they have even sat down to watch the film itself. Interestingly the trailer can actually be seen to directly employ misdirection as a means of subverting audience expectation of the plot. We see Benedict Cumberbatch's character state "He killed our man in Istanbul", this cuts to reveal Tom Hardy's character holstering a gun in his pocket which then cuts to a body on the floor-the implication being his character killed their man in Istanbul. This is in fact not the case at all. A key theme within this movie is information, more specifically the reliability of information-what's 'gold' and what's 'chicken feed' designed to throw the enemy off the scent. The trailer itself can be seen to feed the audience this 'chicken feed' through misdirecting their gaze at Hardy's character. By unveiling negative information we are set up unknowingly so that when we watch the full feature and learn the nature of this treachery we're encouraged to hold everything that is displayed and told with an equal amount of scrutiny as Smiley. Investigating our way through the film by his side.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy's trailer can be seen as a way of actually embroiling the audience within the complexities of the narrative by confounding their assumptions and craftily misdirecting their gazes. A far cry away from the blunt and tactless exposition adopted by the advertising departments for Grave Encounters and The Thing and a clearly more effective promotional tool.