to make the world a safer place
Andrew
Bovell (screenplay, based on a novel by John Le Carré), Anton Corbijn
(director) A Most Wanted Man / 2014
Set
against the important German seaport city of Hamburg, where Mohammed Atta and
his collaborators planned the 9/11 attacks, Anton Corbijn’s tense adventure
film, A Most Wanted Man, radiates a
sense of paranoia. The local authorities, particularly the head of Hamburg
intelligence Dieter Mohr (Rainer Bok), along with his associates, including the
American agent Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright), are triggered for unmediated
action every time anyone with even slightly suspicious credentials appears on
their radar.
Meeting up with a muslin woman, Leyla
(Derya Alabora) and her son, Issa soon makes contact with a well-meaning
lawyer, Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), whose non-profit organization helps
illegal immigrants and unrepresented outcasts find ways in which to gain entry
in German culture. Unwittingly, she commits to the young man—whom she believes
to be innocent of any criminal action as strongly as Dieter Mohr will soon be
convinced of the boy’s intent to hook up with a jihadist group—while
incidentally falling in love with him through Issa’s gentle responses to what
is perhaps the first time in his life he has been shown any tenderness.
Were this story to stop here, playing out
an intense struggle between what might be described as a relative good and evil
battle, A Most Wanted Man—based on a
novel by John le Carré—could be categorized as just another tautly presented
adventure-packed film, about which I would probably have never written. Between
these antipodes, however, lies another reality, led by the hard-working, dour, alcoholic
Günter Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his last on-screen role). Bachmann
and his crack team also work as anti-terrorist forces. But their tactics, which
include a deep embedding of the Islamic community and patient investigation of
interconnecting links between different individuals and communities, reveal an
entirely different reality, a world where, as Sullivan admits, some people can
do a great deal of good and still do a few bad things. In short, as opposed to
the black-and-white realities expressed in the Hamburg intelligence office and
by the Americans who have previously botched one of Bachmann’s jobs back in
Beirut, Bachmann and his organization perceive various levels of good and evil,
using their all too human connections as links to out what may be the most truly destructive and
violent of individuals and organizations.
Given his far greater understanding of the
complexity of human nature, and his intent to use smaller criminals to catch
larger prey, it is hardly any wonder that Bachmann is suspicious of nearly
everyone outside of his small organization. He lives in an encapsulated world
represented in the film not only in the greens and browns I have already
mentioned, but in the lurid reds, yellow, and blues of the underground, a kind
of cinematic hothouse wherein he and his colleagues seem to work night and day
without any sleep.
The reviewer from Time Out described Hoffman’s performance as “dyspeptic” and “uninvolving,”
but his grouchy, seemingly noncommittal behavior is actually a shield to
protect him from the wolves by which he is surrounded.
One such being is Martha Sullivan, who
pretends to support his actions, gradually gaining his trust through her
arguments that the often brutal and often inhuman actions she and he employ are
a way “to make the world a safer place.” That belief, in fact, is what makes
Bachmann so vulnerable. At heart, he is a true believer, a man who actually is
convinced of the Muslin Chechen’s innocence, and a man committed to keep his
word not only to Jamal and to the lawyer Richter, but to the banker Tommy Brue
(Willem Dafoe) who is basically honest, but is forced to live up to the evil
enterprises—just like Issa must—of his father.
The very fact that a spy might actually see
his or her actions has somehow helping the human condition is unthinkable, so
director Corbijn, his screen writer Andrew Bovell, and original novelist Le
Carré convince us. To even want to save the world, one must be a kind of
missionary, a ridiculous believer in human beings and their interrelationships
with others. If Bachmann, through Hoffman’s quite brilliant portrayal of him,
is a growling mess of nerves—his language hardly comprehensible at some moments,
while at other times, particularly in his father-like relationship with the conflicted
Jamal, an expression of something close to love—he is also a kind of sainted
seer, a man who, if given half a chance, just might actually save people’s
lives and maybe make the world somewhat better. He is, in short, “a most wanted
man.”
The last few scenes of this excellent film
are so brilliantly shot that they might be used as textbook examples of great
cinematography. As both my theater-going companion, Thérèse Bachand and I
noticed, the lurid colors of the underground suddenly disappear to be replaced
by a realist palette of bright browns, grays, and khaki; Bachmann’s face is
twisted from a kind of ashen rose of his previous stoicism into a pink howl of injustice
and rage. Reality has hit him where it hurts most, in his mind and heart. The
final image is of a man who no longer matters, a figure who simply wanders, his
back to the audience, out of frame—much like the actor, just a few weeks later,
sank out of our lives.
Los Angeles,
August 3, 2014
Reprinted
from Nth Position (England)
(September 2014).
No comments:
Post a Comment