A Most Wanted Man

A Most Wanted Man begins with a closeup of a harbor in Hamburg, Germany. Waves rhythmically crash against the cracked stone structure of the piers, probing its defenses. Onscreen text informs the audience that Mohammad Atta conceived the September 11 attacks from that city, an event that went ignored by it’s inefficient intelligence community. Since then, it says, Hamburg has been on high alert, intent on not repeating past mistakes. Immediately afterward, director Anton Corbjin cuts to a man, later identified as Issa Karpov, as he suspiciously rises out of the water and, with the cover of the night, disappears into the open, unprotected city. In a few minutes, Corbin effectively establishes the paranoia that took a hold of the city after 9/11, and he works hard to build that same fear in his audience. He forces it to ask, is this Hamburg’s next mistake? The world’s next threat?

The rest of the film focuses on the efforts of several individuals, many of them spies, as they struggle to locate and deal with Karpov and what he might represent. Gunther Bachman (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a German spy, leads the chase for Karpov with a team that includes his protege, Erna Frey (a fantastic Nina Hoss), and an American diplomat, Martha Sullyvan (Robin Wright). The case later involves Karpov’s reluctant banker Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe) and the goodhearted lawyer Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams) who decides, against all advice, to defend Karpov. All of the characters are forced to ask themselves tough questions. None is spared: Who are these “terrorists” we deal with regularly? Why do the act the way they do? Most of them would like to believe in the innate goodness of themselves and other people, but the memory of the attacks linger in their minds, making them adopt a “guilty until proven innocent” mindset that by the end of the film proves catastrophic for all involved. 

While Corbjin exploits the political atmosphere of the post 9/11 world, he restrains himself from ever declaring a political agenda. He is not concerned, for example, with the morality or effectivity of torture, nor does he make a case for or against intelligence institutions and their increasing prominence in recent years. Yes, torture is a part of our world. Yes, institutions like the CIA have massive powers that they didn’t have before. But Corbjin doesn’t use these universally accepted truths to make argue for or against a political position. Instead, he uses them to explore how they have affected the people involved with them. In that way, A Most Wanted Man is more philosophical than political in the question it raises. “Every good man has a little bit of bad, doesn’t he?” the cynical Martha tells Gunther. In this modern, post 9/11 world where people are inclined to see the worst in each other, A Most Wanted Man dares to see the best, and central to this viewpoint is Philip Seymour Hoffman's humanizing performance.

Hoffman plays Gunther as a disillusioned, beaten down spy. Gunther’s job consists mostly of gathering information, talking with his sources, and persuading other people to help him achieve his goal. He is the anti-cinematic spy, which is to say real life spies probably have jobs more akin to his than to that of any other spy ever depicted onscreen. Hoffman’s labored breathing and broken expressions convey the great weight the job has on Gunther, but no matter how hard it gets, he keeps pushing through “to make the world a safer place,” an idea that makes the horrors of his job bearable.
There are so many tired tropes Corbjin could have lazily relied upon, not just with Gunther, the hardened spy, but with the rest of the characters as well: the evil businessman (played, of course by the devilish Willem Dafoe), the seemingly peaceful Muslim who is lured by the terrorist cause, the naive idealist lawyer whose rosy world view is shattered by the events of the film. It’s a miracle that none of these characters ever become as simple as they could have been. Take Dr. Faisal Abdullah, a suspected terrorist whom Gunther and his team closely survey. He could have easily been the big bad bearded terrorist out to destroy Western civilization. Instead, he turns out to be a genuine philanthropist and a family man with a strong bond to his son. Though he’s not shown much, Corbjin makes an effort to understand him, and so does Gunther in a powerful scene in which he tries to think through the other man’s motivation. Both see the humanity in a person many would like to believe is a faceless monster. 

In the end, the film is optimistic in that it truly believes in the efforts of its protagonists, but it is never delusional. It ends with a (literal) crash that seems to wake up its characters to their harsh realities. Corbjin does not pretend that a few good people will change the way society behaves. What they can do, he seems to say, is to keep working on changing the minds of the majority until they see the light, but that takes time and effort, generations, even. (The film is full of sons intent on correcting the mistakes of their fathers.) In that sense A Most Wanted Man is neither like the idealistic "The West Wing" (1999) nor the hopeless "House of Cards" (2013) (two of the representative pre/post 9/11 examples of political filmmaking), but it's certainly a step in the right direction.

Verdict- 3.5/4
A Most Wanted Man (2014) 2h 2min. R.