A Most Wanted Man (2014) – A young Chechen man arrives in Hamburg and immediately comes to the attention of the anti-terrorist forces in Germany. He will be caught up in in post-9/11 paranoia, anti-Islamic suspicions and departmental conflict while his young attorney tries to “normalize” his stay.
It has been my practice here NOT to review current release movies. There are plenty of people doing that so I’ve turned my attention to bringing both classic movies and lesser known films into the spotlight for people looking for good movies. “A Most Wanted Man” was Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last complete film and a spy thriller (a personal favorite genre) so it was a must see. What I saw was so compelling I’m going to bend the rules a little. Why not, they’re my rules.
There’s a generation of movie goers for whom the term “spy thriller” means the Bourne movies or the Mission Impossible films. I grew up watching and reading Cold War spy stories. The novels of John Le Carre, Graham Greene and Robert Ludlum created story genre that was paranoid, claustraphobic, bureacracy bound and amoral. A world where alliances were fleeting and the truth was a fluid concept. Right and wrong? Fairy tales for children. “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold”, any of the GeorgeSmiley novels, “Our Man In Havana”, “The Quiet American”, “The Third Man” or even the Bourne novels created a world that seemed to be at odds with our own, even as it described those who were working to protect some version of that world. While I really enjoy the Bourne movies, I miss the complex, intellectual challenge of the labyrinthine plot and counterplot of a Cold War spy movie.
Within ten minutes of the movie beginning I was thinking “This feels like a Le Carre movie” (I hadn’t done much research and didn’t know that it is based on a Le Carre novel, with the author and his son actively involved in the production). Beyond the familiar convoluted story telling landscape I was captured by the brilliant acting in the movie as well.
The loss of Hoffman is such a huge blow to the acting landscape that it can barely be described. He is at his usual nuanced best here as Gunther, leader of a “black unit”, a secret project designed to track down terrorist threats before they become terrorist events. Rachel McAdams does a wonderful job as the idealistic (and inevitably, slightly naive) attorney, Annabel Richter, trying to bring her client into legal compliance as regards his immigration. Robin Wright is excellent in a small role as the American intelligence liaison from the embassy, Martha Sullivan. Willem Dafoe gives us something slightly different than usual as banker Tommy Brue. Dafoe usually gives us characters with both power and control. Brue believes he has both but quickly finds that both have eluded him as he is drawn into the spy’s byzantine world view.
The most stunning performance is by Grigory Dobrygin who plays the “most wanted man”, Chechen refugee Issa Karpov. The victim of Russian torture, and a Muslim from a suspect background, Dobrygin brings an enormous feeling of sadness and defeat to the role. He has very few lines in comparison to Hoffman, Dafoe or McAdams but when he is on screen I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. The razor thin control of his underlying violence, the profound faith that helps him survive, and that pain in his eyes, oh the pain in his eyes, make him one of the most compelling performances I have seen in a while.
Parts of the story will not go over well with some parts of the American audience. They won’t like the ending and they won’t like that the Americans are held in such poor regard by the rest of the cast. In my opinion, the ending is brilliant and, sadly, we have earned EXACTLY this reputation in the world. Through the Labor Day weekend the movie has brought in just shy of 16 million dollars so it will hardly be categorized as a summer hit (although the summer overall has been a great disappointment at the box office). At the same time it is very much a movie worth seeing.
Especially if you love old school spy thrillers.
I went back and forth on my rating. I’ve tried avoid “half star” ratings but this one certainly pushed me on that. In the end I decided to “round up” because of the performances by both Hoffman and Dobrygin.
Rating – ***** Highly Recommended
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