Movie: A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man:  a movie to see for reasons beyond the fact that it was Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s last movie.  The film is based on a 2008 John LeCarre novel.  It takes place in Hamburg, Germany.  Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, a German intelligence officer with a drinking problem.  Bachmann is the head of a small outfit operating without official German government authority.  His outfit is assigned the job of forestalling another September 11 attack.  The movie opens with two plotlines:  Hoffman’s organization is to trace certain funding by an individual who is running a legitimate non-profit organization but who is also diverting some of the money to terrorist organizations; the second involves an illegal immigrant, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), who is identified as Chechen.  The storylines intersect after we learn that Issa’s father deposited a significant amount of money with a Hamburg banker.  When the film opens, both Issa’s father and the banker are dead.  We are not told exactly how the funds were accumulated but we know it was not through good deeds.  The movie pivots around Issa, even though he is not on screen for a significant portion of the movie.  Issa wants sanctuary.  The story unfolds through the actions by his lawyer, played by Rachel McAdams, and the banker’s son, Tommy Brue, played superbly by Willem Dafoe.  We learn that Gunther does not have a good working relationship with the German authorities and that he is, with cause, distrustful of the Americans.  Gunther had headed up an operation in Beirut that was compromised due to an American “error”.  The Hoffman character is on screen for most of the film’s 121 minutes and he is a brooding presence.  The film is directed by Anton Corbijn, who sets the appropriate tone and mood for what unfolds.  The cast is predominately German but the dialogue is in English.  Under Corbijn’s direction and with Hoffman’s performance, the narrative is allowed to unfold with the typical subtleties  one expects when LeCarre is the source material.  In other words, this is not a Tom Cruise film where action rules regardless of logic.  Rather, this is a grim narrative with a moral foundation that will hold you to the end.  With the amount of cigarettes and alcohol he consumes throughout the film, Hoffman gives a fine closing performance.