Even after ten years, the loss ofPhilip Seymour Hoffmanis still shocking, not only because he was only 46, but because anyone who has mastered their craft as heroically as Hoffman was felt to have, seems invincible. At the time, he was working on the final film in The Hunger Games franchise, in which he played a supporting role. But the last film he saw completed wasA Most Wanted Man, an adaptation of aJohn le Carréspy novel, directed byAnton Corbijn. Hoffman plays Günther Bachmann, the cerebral director of a German off-the-books counter-terrorism task force. Hoffman was equally good in many films, but this performance, and this film, are among his best. Revisiting this film raises the question, what are the similarities between a world-class actor and a world-class spy?
Hoffman Headlines an Adaptation From the Cynical Mind of John le Carré
Le Carré’s career began in 1961, when he was still an officer with MI6 (the British Foreign Intelligence Service), and continued for many decades, both during the Cold War and after. His final novel was published posthumously in 2021. His novels are deeply cynical about whether Western intelligence services are a force for good in the world. Their endings are relentlessly bleak gut punches. It’s not that le Carré doesn’t believe there are talented and noble spies, he just doesn’t believe there are enough of them. Ambition, corruption, and professional rivalry result in the worst people rising to the top of the service agencies, where they thwart the best intentions of their most talented operatives. Throughout le Carré’s career,his novels have been frequently adaptedfor both film (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) and television (The Night Manager,The Little Drummer Girl). Several of the adaptations have happy endings, of a sort, but most of those are changes from the source material.
Bachmann is one of these especially talented spies. His mission is to subdue any militant movements in the Islamic world. His team is free from legal oversight, yet his methods, on the surface, seem gentle. His primary tool is persuasion. As the story begins, he has opened a line of communication to the son of Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi) a Muslim philanthropist, who, though primarily a man of peace, has maintained connections to militant movements. The slim portion of money Abdullah slips to militants are an expression of his sliver of doubt in the goodness of Western civilization. As Bachmann describes it to his CIA counterpart(Robin Wright), “He sees his people getting fucked over from here to eternity, so maybe a little bit of him wants to return the favor. But it’s that little bit that makes him so valuable.” Bachmann believes that he can turn Abdullah, a good man with questionable impulses, into an asset.
An opportunity arises when Bachmann’s team discovers that Issa Karpov(Grigoriy Dobrygin), a suspected Chechen terrorist, has been smuggled into Germany. Karpov is the son of a deceased Russian warlord, and he’s come to claim a fortune that his father left to him, stored in a German bank. However, Issa is a truly decent man, who hates what his father stood for, and feels ambivalent about taking his money. Issa begins to fall in love with Annabel Richter(Rachel McAdams), the lawyer helping him. Bachmann has Annabel illegally arrested, and, while she’s imprisoned, he convinces her to help execute his master plan. She will convince Issa to donate his fortune to Dr. Abdullah so that Abdullah will be tempted to donate a portion of this windfall to an Al-Qaeda front group. Then, Bachman will convince him to flip on his new allies.
It’s an ingenious plan, and It’s difficult while watching the film to resist rooting for Bachmann and his team (played by an incredible European cast ofDaniel Brühl,Vicky Krieps, andNina Hoss) to succeed. But this identification is strange if you think about it. Bachmann isn’t working to prevent an imminent threat of any kind. There are no terrorists in the film, only innocents. Bachmann’s superiors are all much viler than him. They’re blunt instruments, who would prefer to arrest Karpov and Abdullah right away, to parade them in front of news cameras. But Bachmann himself is capable of darkness when he needs to be. We have no reason to sympathize with this character. But we do, because of Hoffman.
Hoffman is Secretly the Film’s ‘Most Wanted Man’
The film suggests, at first, that its title,A Most Wanted Manrefers to Dr. Abdullah, or perhaps Karpov. Because of their internal contradictions, they represent a potential bridge between Western intelligence agencies, with their stated goal of “making the world a safer place,” and the men of violence in the Islamic world. Bachmann’s skill is his ability to find men like these and to successfully coax them into betraying their own people, in the name of peace. “It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda, a barracuda to catch a shark,” as Bachmann describes the chain of connections he intends to leverage.
But, as it turns out, the true “most wanted man” is Bachmann himself. Like the people he chases, he is a man of internal contradictions. He empathizes with the desire of men like Abdullah to fight back against the oppression of their people. Yet, he also believes in the system he works for; that he serves justice, or at least the common good. But he’s wrong. In fact, his superiors in German intelligence, and at the CIA, are using him the same way he thinks he’s using Abdullah and Karpov. They allow him to believe that they’ve bought into his vision of intelligence work practiced as humanely as possible. But in the end, they swoop in and grab the assets he’s carefully cultivated, to be taken to America, where they’ll be tortured for whatever they might know. It’s a brutal act that serves no purpose. Bachmann is humiliated in front of everyone he’s convinced to trust him – his assets, and his team. The movie ends with startling abruptness shortly after.
We began by asking how a master spy is like a master actor. Of course, none of us really know anything about what a master spy is like.We only know how they are presented, in film after film. But there is something about the wayA Most Wanted Manpresents spies as people who pursue people with internal contradictions, that evokes the work of an actor. Because actors have to confront these contradictions as well. They have to find a way to make them make sense and to synthesize them into a character that feels whole.
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Günther Bachmann is A Quietly Broken Man
Can the contradictions within the character of Günther Bachmann be made sense of? If he’s such a brilliant spy and judge of character, then why doesn’t he realize that he is being set up? There are moments in his scenes with Robin Wright when the signs of his eventual betrayal are staring him in the face. How do you play that, as an actor?
Hoffman plays Bachmann as a man who gives away very little. This makes sense for a spy, but, after rewatching the movie a few times, it starts to seem that the secret Bachmann is keeping is from himself. Part of his backstory is that he has been through all of this before, in Beirut, where a carefully designed operation of his ended tragically. There are moments in the movie when Bachmann allows himself to hope that this time will be different, as various pieces of his plan fall into his place. But there are also moments when it seems like he knows that none of this will work out and that no matter how brilliant his game plan is, disaster is the only outcome. Hoffman is not only able to convey the secret despair in a confident man of action, he is able to show how Bachmann suppresses that despair to continue on in the face of doom.
The thing about the contradictions that actors are forced to resolve is that they are very real. They often represent conflicted intentions that the writer and director have not, themselves, resolved. And often those conflicts are the direct result of a conflict that is buried deep within the culture from which the film emerged.A Most Wanted Manfollowed very closely after the release of another star-studded movie about the “war on terror:‘Zero Dark Thirty.That movie, which presented a fictionalized version of the CIA’s capture of Osama bin Laden,faced a lot of criticismbecause it seemed to suggest that the willingness of CIA agents to brutally torture suspects didn’t make them bad people. Its director,Katheryn Bigelow,tried to address these criticisms in an op-ed, but all that did was make it clear that she had not really solved the contradiction for herself. The agents in her film “fought bravely even as theysometimescrossed moral lines,” she wrote. The unresolved tension in those words, camouflaged behind a veil of sophistication, is inherent in the American self-image.
Her film ended with a closeup of the film’s star,Jessica Chastain, in the immediate aftermath of Bin Laden’s death, as a single tear rolled down her cheek. What that tear meant was left ambiguous; it could scale up or down based on the viewer’s own sense of the scale of the American government’s sins. The only person who was really compelled to make a decision about why the character was crying, was Jessica Chastain herself. Being an actor is serious stuff. Sometimes, you’re alone, facing age-old contradictions that have the weight of state secrets, that sometimes even your director is unwilling to acknowledge. And your job is to make these contradictions whole and to keep them invisible. That is the trade Hoffman had mastered and in his last film, he was still on top of his craft.
