Nailbiter: Intricate game of spycraft

24 October 2014 - 02:24 By Tim Robey, © The Daily Planet
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CHECKMATE: Anton Corbijn's 'A Most Wanted Man' stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, right, in one of his last performances
CHECKMATE: Anton Corbijn's 'A Most Wanted Man' stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, right, in one of his last performances
Image: LIONSGATE

Philip Seymour Hoffman isn't playing the title character in A Most Wanted Man, but there's absolutely no doubt about who we most want to see, most want dominating the film, and most want back. Of the various projects left unreleased when he died - with the next two Hunger Games sequels still to come - this is clearly the fillet.

Of the various projects left unreleased when he died - with the next two Hunger Games sequels still to come - this is clearly the fillet.

Like so many Hoffman characters, his Günther Bachmann is a stifled, almost ruinously intelligent and lonely being. He hulks, he shuffles, he measures his words - delivered in a clipped, curious Teutonic accent - with a waiting-game precision. Even by the actor's remarkable standards, Hoffman's wheezing authority is lavishly mesmerising in this: it's legitimately one of his three or four greatest performances, and as you start to deduce how great it is you feel his loss keenly and afresh.

Lived-in fatigue was the baseline for almost all Hoffman's best work, and you won't find many jobs more fatigue-inducing than that of Bachmann, a German spymaster involved in the constant finessing of anti-terror operations without causing any diplomatic meltdowns.

As the film starts, he's licking his wounds in Hamburg, after a mission in Beirut went disastrously wrong. "My network was blown," he explains to an American attaché called Martha (Robin Wright), but a veil is drawn over the deaths it caused.

The film is based on John le Carré's 2008 thriller of the same name, but its personnel have been somewhat reshuffled.

You wouldn't necessarily have picked Bachmann as the prime mover in that story, but Anton Corbijn and his screenwriter, Andrew Bovell, have reorbited it around him. It becomes a complicated chess game in which Bachmann is the white king, moving stealthily, square by square, while other characters get flashier sallies or long-range bits of business. He's not always well-guarded and come the end game he's having to watch his back.

The terrific young Russian actor Grigoriy Dobrygin (How I Ended This Summer) plays Issa Karpov, a Chechen refugee who has entered Hamburg illegally and is suspected by the Russian authorities of being a terrorist.

Compared with the spider web sprawl of machinations in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the story here is contained, pointed and topically very specific: it is about degrees of allegiance to a notorious cause, and whether having half a foot in the enemy's camp is grounds to have the whole leg amputated. Bachmann explains the pointlessness of biting off one small hydra-head, rather than exploiting the compromised ideologies of Islamist sympathisers to dig right into the extremist mother lode.

Beautifully directed by Corbijn, the film even outdoes Tinker, Tailor as ruffled human portraiture, a vital window into the personal cost of retaining your principles.

  • A Most Wanted Man opens at NuMetro cinemas today.

What others say

A weirdly bracing atmosphere of disillusion pervades this superbly composed and controlled movie.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

'A Most Wanted Man' is quietly intriguing but the emotional ante is low.

Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent

Le Carré wrote a mordant, morally complicated book. The movie is much condensed and a little tepid.

David Denby, The New Yorker

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