The best scene in Tinker Tailor (2011)

Benedict Cumberbatch said about working in this scene that all he had to do was sit back and enjoy Gary Oldman do a one-man show. God bless, so do we. “What did he say?” his character asks a tipsy, midnight hour Smiley. A protagonist who by that point (about halfway through the movie, really) has barely spoken, barely emoted, Smiley begins to let us in by confusing us: “Think of your wife,” he quotes, but the words, it turns out, came from him, not Karla. Meanwhile, in a movie of carefully composed frames and hypnotic pacing, the camera does something very unexpected: it pans out to put Smiley opposite an empty chair. Then Gary Oldman weaves some magic. His old spymaster mimes props, clips muttered phrases, repeats things he said decades ago and now come out festered. He loses control in degrees, but each degree unearths years of self-loathing.

Karla, it turns out, never said a word.

YouTube has a few actors filming themselves doing this monologue. It’s no wonder. Gary Oldman in this has built an entire history into a character who is a locked room. He sinks back into the chair, changes his mind and stretches out again, says more of the things he once hoped would bring him closer to the one on the other side. The lighting outlines him in profile, digs into his wrinkles, his forward slouch, his features suddenly wide with mock earnestness. “Use my lighter.” That’s all he has to say. There was once someone on the other side who read as fundamentally the same as him. Someone who could have used a lighter. There is now

an empty

chair

.

PS. Smiley opens up a little, but before the scene ends he has clammed back up. The movie makes Guillam, Cumberbatch’s character who has been given this rare intimate moment of intimacy, pay for it, because that is when Smiley leans on him to get him to break up with his boyfriend (homosexuality being a political liability within the movie’s setting.) The monologue’s emotional dynamic of long-sustained blowback expands to engulf Guillam, indeed informs the entire movie.