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An impression of moral ambivalence is the key thing when you're adapting a John le Carre novel. It’s a principle that this film's director, Anton Corbijn, has clearly taken to heart because he has recruited a cast of experts.
His star is Philip Seymour Hoffman, an actor who could set a railways timetable humming with serious ethical implications. To further raise the stakes, he’s working with Robin Wright, fresh from her turn as Washington DC’s Lady Macbeth in House of Cards, together with Willem Dafoe, who can conjure up a sense of menace just by smiling.
A Most Wanted Man is the last film Hoffman finished before his sudden death five months ago. We’re still to see him in the next Hunger Games instalment but this is his last leading role, and it’s a great final curtain. He is cast as a German intelligence operative and there are times when the precision of the accent combines with his husky baritone to bring his dialogue close to poetry.
Australia’s Andrew Bovell must be delighted. He wrote the script, hired on the strength of his complex and sophisticated Lantana screenplay. He has an equally intricate storyline to handle here, although the film does streamline le Carre’s original plot. If it hadn’t, I might still be in the cinema.
It’s shot in Hamburg in tones of steely blue and muted gold and you’re never far from the city’s shipyards and financial district, but you also get a glimpse of what it must be like to live among its many minority groups. And you’re frequently reminded of the fact that Mohammed Atta and his fellow conspirators lived here while they plotted 9/11.
Hoffman’s Gunther Bachmann and his small team of spies are tracking a young mystery man whom they finally identify as Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin). He has found his way to Hamburg after being imprisoned for a time and viciously tortured by the Russians. Half-Russian, half-Chechen, he is bent on claiming a large sum of money held in the Hamburg bank run by Dafoe’s Thomas Brue.
Bachmann and his team want to let him succeed, in the hope he will eventually lead them to the leaders of the terrorism and arms-dealing groups they’re out to crack. But as usual in le Carre, they finish up having to battle the enemy within.
Ranged against them are Bachmann’s shifty-eyed superiors in the intelligence service and the interior ministry. As for Robin Wright’s CIA chief, we don’t know what to think of her. Bachmann doesn’t trust her but he’s wondering if he should. The only wholly altruistic character is Rachel McAdams’ naive young human rights lawyer, who’s convinced Karpov is an innocent.
Bovell hasn’t quite succeeded in taming the serpentine twists that spring from all this. It seems at times as if the writing is favouring plot at the expense of character but no matter how much talk Corbijn has to cover – and there’s a lot – he retains his grip on the tension levels.
This is not the best le Carre we’ve seen on the big screen. Tomas Alfredson’s version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) still sets that benchmark. But it’s great Seymour Hoffman.
