Butler's Cinema Scene

Philip Seymour Hoffman in “A Most Wanted Man”

“A MOST WANTED MAN”  My rating: B (Now showing)

121 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Even without the knowledge that it features one of  the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last filmed performances, “A Most Wanted Man” would be a dark, melancholy affair.

After all, Anton Corbijn’s film is based on a John le Carre espionage procedural. As such, it unfolds in a world of spook/bureaucrats where good and evil are more a matter of opportunity than absolutism, a world where the unsuspecting, the innocent, and the idealistic pretty much get eaten alive.

In Hamburg, Germany, a shaggy, soaking wet man pulls himself from the harbor and onto dry land. This scarecrowish figure is Issa Karpov (Grigorly Dobrygin), a Chechnian Muslim suspected by Western intelligence services of being a dangerous jihadist. With haunted eyes staring out of a grey hoodie, Issa seems more like a sorry, half-mad monk than a an actual threat.

But his arrival sets off a manhunt in the world of spies. Gunther Bachmann (Hoffman) runs a super-secret anti-terrorism unit of the German government. Unlike most of his rivals in the intelligence community, Gunther views the fugitive Issa not as a threat but as an opportunity.  Like a chess player whose strategy is always several moves ahead of the actual game, Gunther believes he can use Issa to trap a much juicier target, a fundraiser for Muslim charities (Homayoun Ershadi) who may be siphoning off money to buy rocket launchers rather than medical supplies.

There’s no point in trying to describe the knotty machinations that follow.  Let’s just say that they involve a lawyer for a human rights group (Rachel McAdams) who becomes Issa’s protector,  a banker (Willem Dafoe) whose firm maintains an account set up decades earlier by Issa’s father, and a CIA operative (Robin Wright) who uses her clout to back Gunther’s long game despite pressure from other spooks who want to immediately scoop up Issa and throw him into the shadowy underworld of terrorist detention.

This isn’t your typical spy movie.  No guns are fired. No chases down dark, wet alleys.

Instead we get a slowly-paced game of wits that gradually builds to a crushing conclusion.

Rachel McAdams, Grigorly Dobrygin

Everyone in the film is good.  But Hoffman is terrific.

His Gunther (he does a great German accent) is a fat, physically weary fellow whose intellect is always operating at high speed.  Gunther chain smokes, chugs whiskey, and perambulates in a wrinkled khaki topcoat that might have been left behind by Peter Falk’s Columbo.

Gunther is not above slamming a suspect up against the wall, but it’s a matter of traction, not sadism.  Despite being in a ruthless business, he’s a man with a conscience, aware that in the search for bad guys, good guys can become collateral damage. He feels a moral obligation to avoid that if possible.

Like the best of Le Carre’s yarns, “A Most Wanted Man” sets us up for one outcome and then pulls a switcheroo, leaving us hanging on the barbed-wire fence of fate and betrayal. This isn’t movie spycraft. It’s much closer to the real thing.

| Robert W. Butler