Anton Corbijn’s ‘A Most Wanted Man’ (second review)

In Anton Corbijn’s screen adaptation of le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man — the rather arch title really refers to the state’s ability to conjure up its foes, Orwell-style, on demand — there’s no bomb-toting bad guy at the bottom of the pile, just human wreckage. The scene is Hamburg, a city resurrected after its obliteration in World War II by Allied bombing and also the place where the 9/11 attacks were hatched. In Benoît Delhomme’s artful cinematography, it is a shadowed place, like a face with something off. We see a hooded, bearded young man surreptitiously entering it and know that he is the bearer of trouble.

The young man is Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Chechen refugee who attracts the attention of those whose job it is to know of people like him. One of them is Günther Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who runs a private espionage agency that does things for Germany’s GSG-9 that must be kept off the books. Bachmann maintains an uneasy relationship with his official counterpart, Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bock), who like any bureaucrat resents a freelancer on his turf.

Issa turns out to be the heir to a significant fortune through his Russian father, and when he proposes to turn it over to a local cleric (Homayoun Ershadi) with ties to various Muslim “charities,” Bachmann sees a means to flush out his actual business. The problem is complicated by a young lawyer, Annabel (Rachel McAdams), who offers to help Issa gain asylum, and by a CIA operative, Martha (Robin Wright), who tugs at Bachmann’s leash.

Bachmann is on the case only because he has located Issa, whom he comes to believe is on the up-and-up and whom he proposes through Annabel to help in return for his serving as bait. The other interested parties have their own designs, however, and Bachmann is in the end only a more or less useful tool. The only principle in this world is expendability.

Damaged souls

The convoluted plot unfolds slowly and drags in the middle. Much of its weight falls on Bachmann, through whose eyes we see the world it reveals. We don’t, however, learn much about who Bachmann himself is. (In Hoffman’s performance — his last starring role — he is given to long pauses.) As the character’s trade requires, he is manipulative and shrewd at assessing weaknesses other than his own. Kidnapping and blackmail are all in a day’s work. What distinguishes him from his more properly licensed colleagues is his residual willingness to consider the humanity of those he pursues. Damaged himself, he recognizes the possibility of damage (and therefore of potential redemption) in others. But it’s also what makes him vulnerable, which his fellow professionals are not.

In the film’s critical scene, a chat with Martha, Bachmann asks her why she’s in the business. “To make the world a safer place,” she replies, with straight-faced irony. It’s a line Bachmann himself will later use, as if to show its utter emptiness. Safety is something one seeks for schoolchildren crossing the street, not as the cardinal value in an adult world, where it can only mean the relentless policing of the security state — a point anticipated long ago in Ben Franklin’s oft-quoted but insufficiently regarded adage that those who would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither. A perfectly safe world is a dead zone; it is also a world in which only suspects exist, and in which, since no one can be free of suspicion, there is no one to be actually made safe. For the Marthas of this world, it is a license to “disappear” people — i.e., not merely to kill them but to revoke their existence.

“Disappearance” can happen to agents as well as suspects, of course. Bachmann is haunted by the memory of a botched operation in which his own operatives were lost. Martha tells him, in an aside, that that one was actually on her account, although whether this is a confession or a warning (or both) is unclear. It is certainly a reminder to Bachmann that he is not safe.

The production values in A Most Wanted Man are superior, and, although long takes are preferred, the editing is crisp. Herbert Grönemeyer’s score is atmospheric, and the composer himself has a minor acting role. The performances are good. Much rests on Hoffman. His character’s flaw consists in believing that the world cannot exist unless at least one person in it is innocent, an illusion Martha and Dieter have shed. When the inevitable trap is sprung on him, he is left with the hollow regret of having been human. It is hard to separate Hoffman’s performance from our knowledge of his death: it’s like watching a man writing his own epitaph. Perhaps that’s how A Most Wanted Man must be remembered.

For another review by Mark Wolverton, click here.