Anton Corbijn (2014)
Philip Seymour Hoffman is yet to be seen in his supporting role in the two-part third instalment of The Hunger Games but his last starring role was in this adaptation of John le Carré’s 2008 novel of the same name (the screenplay is by Andrew Bovell). A Most Wanted Man is obviously worth going to see for that reason alone – it turns out there are no other good reasons for seeing it. The setting is Hamburg in the first decade of the twenty-first century. A prologue reminds us that the city was where Mohamed Atta et al planned the Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center; the atmosphere of the place is meant to be heavy with post-9/11 threat and anxiety. Hamburg as realised by Anton Corbijn and his DoP Benoît Delhomme, however, just looks like standard spy drama locale: the prevailing colours are muted blues, greys and greens – they dominate so much that the brief appearance of a yellow seat covering is almost startling. The score by Herbert Grönemeyer is similarly predictable, except for a few moments when, thanks to echoes of Danny Elfman’s music for Batman films, it strays disorientingly into Gotham City. I didn’t understand a lot of the plot but the usual Le Carré dose of disillusioned philosophising about espionage – a dirty-business-in-a-dirty-world – helped me to predict one thing correctly. At one point Hoffman, as the German agent Günther Bachmann, asks Robin Wright as a CIA officer if she ever considers ‘why we do this’. She replies that she does and that she always comes up with the same answer: ‘To make the world a safer place. Isn’t that enough?’ I knew we’d hear those words again – caustically thrown back at Wright by Hoffman – before the film was over, and that some people in the Odeon Red Lion Street would laugh with knowing approval. When the moment and the audience reaction duly arrived, I couldn’t help joining sarcastically in the laughter.
Some of the actors playing Muslim characters do well, especially the younger ones: Grigoriy Dobrygin (from How I Ended This Summer), as a Chechen refugee, and Mehdi Dehbi, as the morally conflicted son of the local philanthropist (Homayoun Ershadi) whom Hoffman and his colleagues suspect of channelling funds to Islamist terrorists. Robin Wright and Willem Dafoe, as a dodgy banker, are both too demonstrative for the characters they’re playing; Daniel Brühl is wasted in a small role as a member of Hoffman’s team; Rachel McAdams, as a German lawyer, is as uninteresting as usual. As in God’s Pocket, it’s sad to watch Hoffman, and not only because this is another swansong unworthy of his talents. If you believe that actors draw on themselves to create their characters, you’ll ask yourself if Günther Bachmann’s solitary sadness and disenchantment reflect something of the man playing him. What is known of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s state of mind and habits at the end of his life makes it even harder to separate the actor from his role – to distinguish Bachmann’s combination of professional alertness and emanation of (self-)disgust from feelings that Hoffman may have had. Yet that alertness means there’s still consoling magic in what he does in A Most Wanted Man. The shallow theatricality of Willem Dafoe and Robin Wright throws into relief Hoffman’s relative subtlety, the perfectly judged weight that he gives to each line. As a physical presence, he’s astonishing: you look at Günther Bachmann sitting quietly in the audience at a public lecture or, in a near back view, alone in his room, stubbing out a cigarette and draining a glass, and you simply wonder at how Philip Seymour Hoffman was able to make such moments utterly compelling.
16 September 2014
