A Most Wanted Man

Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man is a pure John Le Carre spy thriller, but it’s profoundly propelled by the posthumous performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman. Indeed the very title points to both the Chechen Muslim Issa, who’s the focus of the film’s central hunt, and Hoffman, the actor whose suicide leaves us wanting him so much, for the values this performance demonstrates. Even one who goes for the Le Carre will be gripped by the Hoffman. Rarely does an actor’s persona so movingly deepen a performance.

Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, a contemporary German version of LeCarre’s British hero, Smiley.  He’s a shrewd, principled Outsider even in the world of Outsider spies. He’s the Outsider’s Outsider, usually neglected until he has to come clean up the mess. Though the focus is Germany, as in Le Carre’s British-centered spy films the intelligence work is complicated and even thwarted by the tensions between the allies, especially the dread Americans. 

Gunther tries to sustain honour and human trust in his risky job. Nimbly, he shifts from following Issa to follow his money for a larger prey. He sets up Issa’s donation to the legitimate Moslem community in order to catch the illegal siphoning of charitable funds for terrorist uses. In return he promises to protect the tortured Issa by getting him political refugee status in Germany. Gunther tries to save the German lawyer Richter (Rachel McAdams) from dangerous engagement. He wants to save the Imam, whose son has been Bachmann’s protected informer, from destruction by recruiting him as informer.

Those honourable intentions — and any resultant intelligence benefits — are thwarted when the American agent conspires with the German officials to steal both Issa and the imam, to parade them as their counter-espionage successes. That should compensate for the shame of the 9/11 attacks, which were planned in Homburg. As Le Carre updates his setting from the Cold War, Europe is uncomfortably Islamified and there is poor prevention of the funding of terrorists.  

As we know from the genre, the pressures, importance and dangers of Gunther’s 24/7 job drive him to the relief of booze, cigarettes — and too rarely a spell of Bach at the piano. When he kisses his loyal aide as a ploy to prevent suspicion, her reaction suggests the well of passionate engagement he is denying them both. 

Perhaps our first sense of Gunther is the opening shot, a stone wall solid against the thrashing tide of dirty water from which Issa rises. The young man is at once a terrorist threat and an innocent, idealistic victim of both an evil father and real-life stereotyping (aka ethnic profiling). 

Gunther’s emotionally drained state, his alcoholic numbing and his smoking stimulation, and most of all his deep dead eyes gain power from our knowledge of Hoffman’s suicidal overdose. Nowhere is there a better example of Rene Clair’s observation that cinema shows us people dying. Usually we see the actors frozen and preserved in an earlier state, the state they leave as they live and move towards off-screen death. Here we see Hoffman literally played out. He’s a solid wall but he has suffered too many sullied waves.

In this plot Gunther replays his defeat in Lebanon. The Americans mess up the situation and Gunther carries the can. Gunther’s integrity and the value of his commitments to people are betrayed by the impersonal, narrower interests of the larger machine. His German nemesis wears the thin lips and wire glasses of the classic officious Nazi. The American betrayer is more appealingly packaged as the efficient executive (Robin Wright)  but she’s equally unprincipled, self-serving and disastrous. Gunther’s reaction to the betrayal, which violates his promises and integrity and as well frustrates his plans for continuing intelligence, is a scream that would do Munch proud. 

  The last shot works powerfully on both the plot and persona levels. In the plot, Gunther stomps off in anger and frustration, out of the frame. We’re left to wonder if this new betrayal will drive him out of the game. Yes, if the honourable man has taken too many assaults on his honour. No, if he’s as addicted to the adrenalin of his work as he is to his benumbing. The Le Carre hero is dedicated to achieving whatever honest service he can manage in the cold system. 

In the persona, the film closes on a shot of a taxi’s front seat, focused on the steering wheel. The cab driver, that Gunther was pretending to be, is gone. Gunther is gone. Worse, the actor Hoffman is gone. The shot speaks of vacancy, that began with Gunther’s eyes and has now removed not just him but Hoffman entirely. As the pounded wall represented Gunther in the first shot, absence defines him (and Hoffman) in the last. 
     Finally, this film makes Anton Corbijn an emerging auteur to follow. He graduated from music videos to Control (2007) a dramatization of Joy Division’s complicated singer Ian Curtis and his suicide at 23.  In The American (2010) George Clooney plays a master assassin whose last assignment, to Italy, tempts him to a possibly fatal life change. Corbijn appears drawn to high-risk torn figures whose success fails to serve their human needs.