A Most Wanted Man *** (2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Robin Wright, Willem Dafoe, Daniel Brühl) – Movie Review

In another glum and dour adaptation of a John le Carré novel, a brutally tortured Chechen-Russian Muslim immigrant called Issa Karpov turns up illegally in Hamburg’s Islamic community, claiming his father’s ill-gotten fortune. The spy game is engaged when both the German and US security agencies get embroiled to find out if he’s an innocent victim or a guilty terrorist.

A Most Wanted Man is a decent enough movie spy thriller, but it is hard to be truly impressed by it or totally engaged with it. It is really not much of a yarn, there’s little tension, and it is all really quite dull and plodding, with casting, dialogue, plotting and characterisation troubles.

Surprisingly, German rock star Herbert Grönemeyer’s droning, ominous music score is awful and the talented Benoît Delhomme’s cinematography is dreary and grungy looking. But then, to be fair, of course in both cases they are delivering work that was asked of them.

Unfortunately stuck with his phoney German accent throughout, Philip Seymour Hoffman tries hard to stir up an intense, tormented and twitchy performance as Hamburg spy Günther Bachmann, which partly works on its own terms, but he has no rapport with the other actors. His constant chain-smoking is an irritating prop like his accent, and both have to be kept monotonously up once they have started. Nevertheless Hoffman is very watchable, much better than Gary Oldman in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), and indeed this movie is better than that one.

Grigoriy Dobrygin is good as the immigrant Issa Karpov, but at German spy control supporting Hoffman, Nina Hoss and Daniel Brühl make very little headway as Irna Frey and Maximilian, with Hoss having too much to do and the excellent Bruhl having nothing to do, giving the impression that his role is cut, and that there was once much more of the intricacies of the German spy machine.

Robin Wright isn’t quite right as the CIA’s tough Martha Sullivan and the far-too-gorgeous Rachel McAdams is all wrong and out of place as rich girl turned terrorist sympathiser Annabel Richter, while Willem Dafoe overacts impressively as the shady chief banker, Tommy Brue. These are brisk and adequate performances, but not among the good actors’ best work.

Bravely, director Anton Corbijn seems intent on exploring the dark, realistic side of spying. That’s good, but that mean no car chases,  explosions and gun play, and it doesn’t really help Corbijn that there are no exciting action or corkscrew-tense suspense set pieces. I know that it is not that kind of spy thriller, but it really would help in boosting the entertainment factor. The film goes out with a whimper rather than a bang, and the entirely predictable downbeat ending is a damp squib.

Corbijn does a good job on his own terms, though. A Most Wanted Man does feel convincing and realistic enough to bring out the drudgery, frustration and depressing nature of spying. It’s like a documentary on the processes of espionage. The conscientious screenplay by Andrew Bovell (Edge of Darkness, 2010) does effectively suggest the true-life boredom, tedium and frustration of real spying, as opposed to the escapist fun side we see in the Bond and Bourne movies.

Unfortunately, however, it is the heroes and villains fantasy version à la Bond and Bourne that is the entertaining one. Hitchcock might have been able to make something exciting out of the material, though he would have rewritten a lot of the script.

Le Carré worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and early 1960s and worked in Hamburg where the film is set and in Berlin when the Berlin Wall was being built. It is astonishing how he can successfully draw on these old experiences and make them seem relevant and modern.

It is Hoffman’s final completed film.

Awarded a Best Actor Oscar for the 2005 film Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman died on 2 February 2014, aged 46, from acute mixed drug intoxication in his New York City apartment. Born in Fairport, New York, in 1967, Hoffman began his career in the early 1990s with a guest role in TV’s Law & Order, and broke through to the movies in 1992 in four films, including Scent of a Woman.

He acted in The Getaway and Nobody’s Fool, and five films for Paul Thomas Anderson, Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love and The Master, as well as earning acclaim for his performances in Happiness, Flawless, The Talented Mr Ripley, Red Dragon, Almost Famous and Capote, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. He was currently filming The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2. He died a week before filming ended and his role was finished with other characters taking his lines.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

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