I was not the only one chained to the couch by the TV series, when it originally aired. Millions watched and waited, over six weeks, for the mole to be unearthed. The production was one of those lavish, patient affairs which flourished in the heyday of British television drama; its span reached from “The Forsyte Saga,” in 1967, to “The Singing Detective,” nearly two decades later, upheld at its midpoint by “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and, in 1981, by “Brideshead Revisited.” The fact that most of these narratives grew from good books mattered less than the honor and the esteem in which they held their viewers, presuming that we were literate and curious enough to dig in for the long haul, and to stay with the talkative tangles of the plot. That level of fixation was well suited to “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” whose shabby domestic stillness was not so different from the lives of the people watching—as if our TV screen were a net curtain or a half-drawn blind, and we ourselves were spying on the spies. In “Brideshead Revisited,” with its roster of sumptuous locations and the wattage of its supporting stars, beginning with Laurence Olivier, you could see how the budget had been expended. Look at the scroll of actors’ names, however, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”: Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston, Bernard Hepton, George Sewell. I admired Jayston, in particular, who had been a dour but dashing Mr. Rochester in a 1973 version of “Jane Eyre”; he thus made a perfect Peter Guillam, Smiley’s sidekick, a fellow of comparable timbre. None of these solid souls, though, were hired to set the screen ablaze. They were there to simmer.

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It was left to Guinness, of course, to insure that the excitement never quite boiled over. Even the glasses he wore became an item of armor instead of a visual aid. As Smiley donned them, the thickness of the lenses made him downright scary, whereas when he took them off he was left blinking and exposed—could he, we wondered in a burst of heresy, be the mole, after all? In the new movie, the glasses become time frames: Oldman has one pair, horn-rimmed, to show that we are in flashback, with Smiley still working for Control, and another, larger pair to make it clear that we have skipped ahead. That is typical of Alfredson’s film, which is obliged, by its two-hour duration, to keep things crisp.

Here’s the strangest thing: the television series, lasting more than five and a quarter hours, was bovine of pace, often ugly to behold, and content to meander along byways that petered out into open country or led inexorably to dead ends, yet I was tensed and transfixed by every minute, like a worshipper at a familiar Mass whose mystery will never abate. The new version, by comparison, feels purposeful, unbaffled, artfully composed, and lit, amazingly, with hints of jocularity. (There is even a Christmas party at the Circus; imagine what Guinness would have made of that.) But something in the drama has been dulled, and I was almost bored. Irvin’s end credits rolled to the sound of the Nunc Dimittis and a shot of Oxford’s golden stone, mischievously hinting that the whole palaver had been nothing more than a donnish diversion. Alfredson, on the other hand, closes with “La Mer,” which I last heard sung at the end of “Finding Nemo.” As for the dénouement, we have had too little room, in so cramped a space, to spend time with Tinker, Tailor, and the others, and to scrutinize each man in turn, and therefore, at the end, our overwhelming reaction is: Big deal. We got the mole, but do we get the point?

To an extent, this is not Alfredson’s fault. Some of his choices are perverse, like the decision to rehouse Smiley not in the tragic cubbyhole of a hotel, near Paddington Station, to which le Carré rightly consigned him but in a loftlike affair with sizable windows, through which far too many outsiders could peer. Other shifts are more ingenious; where the small screen was ashen and gray, in tribute to the atmosphere of exhaustion that pervades le Carré’s novel, cinemagoers must brace themselves for an explosion of brown. Welcome to the fashionable nineteen-seventies, where your walls matched your sideburns. The sealed, podlike chamber in which the high priests of intelligence convene is a nightmare of muddy orange, and Guillam, the resident cavalier of the Circus, drives not a sporty MG, as he did on TV, but a Citroën DS the color of light manure. One change wrought by Alfredson strikes me as inspired: where Guillam, on the page, was a practiced ladykiller, running a string of girlfriends as if they were foreign agents, we see him now, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, breaking up with a male lover—a secret demanding to be tucked away, in the mid-seventies, far more than it would these days. The question of sexuality barely touches the hem of the Smiley books. “It saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure,” we read in “Call for the Dead,” and he himself is presented as the simplest of fools—married to the lustrous Lady Ann, who dispenses her favors to almost anyone who asks, including Tailor (Colin Firth, in the new film). Cuckoldry has been a comic standby since Aristophanes; in the person of Smiley, I would suggest, the joke, at last, ran out.

When Guillam is left by his companion, he cries: one of a handful of weepers in the new film, which feels more emotionally stricken than its predecessor. The struggle, back then, was a moral one against a nagging dread that the West had nothing more to offer, apart from the satisfaction of greed, than its sterner rival in the East, and that what might remain, between spies, was a pure exchange of tactics, ungilded with sentiment or faith. On TV, the mole, once revealed, declared, “The secret services are the only real expression of a nation’s character,” which is not a bad motto for the whole story. As for his own nation, his main grievance was aimed at its dreamy pretensions of power. “Britain—oh, dear,” he said, with a sniff, adding, “No viability whatever in world affairs.” When you scanned the backdrop of the drama, it was ominously hard to disagree. “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” began with a band of colorless colleagues, either smoking or carrying cups of foul coffee, entering a dingy room, scarcely bothering to greet one another, and expert only in a life of professional pretense. It didn’t seem much to fight for. Yet I have often thought, If only the mole had burrowed down and clung on, he would have seen the land he had loathed and betrayed taken over by a woman who shared every inch of his frustration at its lassitude and pitiful want of pride. Could the double agent not have turned triple, and become a rampant Thatcherite?

In all its forms, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” strikes the eye, and other senses, as demonstrably real. You can taste the “half-eaten food, over which white flakes of fat had formed like seasonable frost.” That is Smiley, dining on the rations of the Cold War; Graham Greene would have smacked his lips. But is any of this true? Is the Circus, as spun into being by le Carré, the sheerest fiction, completely unconnected to the authentic labors of spying, in Britain or elsewhere? “Oh, not completely.” Such was the careful answer proffered by an acquaintance of mine, who knows the Secret Intelligence Service as well as anyone alive. He made three pertinent points. One, that le Carré himself—whose actual name is David Cornwell—served in the S.I.S. for no longer than five years, from 1959 to 1964, and that all his subsequent fables are founded on the template of that distant time. Two, that the sly, sour infighting that leaks through the novels does an injustice to the congenial conduct of most officers in the Service, who are, as my acquaintance said, “notably good company”—as they have to be, given the demands of their trade, which would unsettle lesser or more divisive folk. Three, that le Carré has reversed the polarities. Where there is trust (and espionage, like the military, cannot hope to function without trust), he finds only treachery. Hearts and minds are not to be won, in his world; they are for sale.