A Most Wanted Man

 

Hamburg wouldn’t be many people’s choice to set a modern spy story, but as the preamble to A Most Wanted Man informs us, it was here that the planning of 9/11 took shape. Strangers in town are viewed with extreme suspicion, and the local security services are absolutely determined to make sure no further atrocities are plotted from within its environs. A dishevelled man emerges from the dirty waters of the River Elbe and into this atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion. Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin) is a tortured refugee, and possible Chechnyan terrorist, who stumbles into the path of Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), a human rights lawyer who takes up his plight, and Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe), a guilty-looking banker who holds a small fortune in Karpov’s name. Dogging their footsteps is Gunther Bachmann (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in his last leading role), a spymaster determined that no further terrorist attacks will be planned in Hamburg.

Bachmann, almost as untidy as Karpov, cuts a less than debonair figure in the world of spies. Thinning, lank hair, a paunch that pokes through a series of untucked shirts and rumpled suits, two days of whiskers on his face: his appearance belies the fact that he’s a romantic figure in the film, an exhausted and compromised spy who wants to do the right thing. He strikes a distinct contrast to Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), the impeccably tailored, and therefore highly suspicious, American diplomatic attaché with whom he strikes up a tentative partnership against Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), a supercilious and officious German security head who wants to drop Karpov in a deep, dark hole as quickly as possible. Bachmann’s riskier plan involves using Karpov as bait for a bigger fish, the possibly corrupt philanthropist, Dr Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi).

Beautifully shot by Anton Corbijn, A Most Wanted Man maintains a brooding, muted atmosphere throughout: impersonal offices, spartan temporary bases for Bachmann’s surveillance team, anonymous, grubby bars and disused, oddly threatening concrete locations where spies bicker and snipe at each other. And always, always, the camera follows Hoffman as he shambles through the film. He’s mesmerising in this, chain-smoking and breathing heavily as he painstakingly pieces together a way of gaining traction in the unending War on Terror, absent-mindedly madding to his coffee from a hip flask dragged from his jacket pocket. Bachmann feels like a man who’s given up, but when something sincere pokes through, in a brief and wholly entrancing smile, or in a burst of hopeless rage, you hold your breath and drink him in.

Andrew Bovell’s screenplay, based on the John Le Carré novel of the same name, is subtle and feels as authentically grim and down-to-Earth as real spying must be; dead-drops of cigarette packets containing USB sticks, the dogged following of leads, the slow interrogation of suspicious targets and the grooming of informants. No one chases anyone through the streets with drawn weapons, no one orders a martini, and the main character throws only a single punch, and that at a random drunk who hits a woman in a seedy bar. Love only occasionally peeks out from under the covers, but is quickly smothered before it softens the atmosphere: Karpov’s dips his head towards Richter half in benediction, half in longing, but pulls away in anguish. And is that the tiniest hint of buried longing when Bachmann and his right hand woman, Erna (Nina Hoss), pull out of a kiss designed to ease observation of their targets? Maybe, but they haven’t time for it, and the film barely acknowledges it ever happened.

In the final scene the camera cannot bear to tear itself away from Hoffman, lingering on him until he forces the issue and walks out of shot. A Most Wanted Man is a fine, understated film, and one last piece of proof, if any were really needed, that Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s death is an incalculable loss to cinema.

A Most Wanted Man will be shown at Broadway Cinema until Thursday 25 September 2014.

A Most Wanted Man Official Site