The late actor’s quietly great as a world-weary spy in the thriller A Most Wanted Man .
Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man
Roadside Attractions
Sadly, we're running out of new Philip Seymour Hoffman performances to watch.
The actor appears on screen in the final Hunger Games installments, which he'd almost completed shooting at the time of his death in February at age 47. The pilot he made for Showtime, Happyish, will either be recast or just fade away. It's a uniquely mournful thing, the trickling out of the last bits of work that someone left behind, performances transformed into ghostlike traces. But that shouldn't stop anyone from seeing A Most Wanted Man, which opened in New York and Los Angeles this weekend and will expand to more cities in the next few weeks.
A Most Wanted Man is Hoffman's final leading role, and it's a quiet, superb one. Not that he ever really made a bad movie, or at least, he never did a bad job regardless of the quality of everything around him — but A Most Wanted Man is the type of part that shows off Hoffman's ability to sink into a character, to find the reverberating humanity in someone who, at first glance, might be easy to overlook. Hoffman played some big, showy parts — Lancaster Dodd, Truman Capote, Lester Bangs — and he played them well. But Günther Bachmann, the shabby spy he embodies in A Most Wanted Man, isn't that kind of guy, even as he works toward the half-ironic goal to "make the world a better place."
Kerry Brown/Roadside Attractions
A Most Wanted Man is a collaboration between a director and writer who are both known for works of finely wrought melancholy. It's an adaptation of a novel by John le Carré, the great chronicler of moody espionage sagas like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it's helmed by photographer and filmmaker Anton Corbijn, whose feature debut Control centered on the uneasy, electric life and early death of Joy Division's Ian Curtis. A Most Wanted Man's hero, Günther, the head of a hush-hush anti-terrorism division operating out of Hamburg, is the kind of man who always looks like he's wearing yesterday's clothes. He smokes and drinks, pulling out a flask to spike his coffee while meeting with a formidable CIA observer (Robin Wright), cool as ice under the professional smile.
These things, even if not exactly a front, provide a kind of convenient misdirection for Günther, who has cultivated the air of a failure who was shunted off to his post in the port city after his information networks in Beirut were compromised. But Günther is razor sharp under the slipshod exterior, and he's pursuing two major projects, one long-term and one that lands in his lap. The big fish is Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi), who runs a charitable organization Günther thinks is also funneling money to Al-Qaeda. The newcomer is Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a twentysomething half-Chechen, half-Russian man who arrives in the city either planning something nefarious or looking for asylum.
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