No one could have known it would be one of his final screen appearances – there’s another still to come in a further installment of Hunger Games – but Philip Seymour Hoffman’s role in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man proved, with hindsight, a fitting farewell. This was Hoffman living the part, as on-the-edge, largely off-the-radar Hamburg spymaster Gunter Bachman, whose life and professional energy seems fuelled by cigarettes and whisky.
Adapted from John Le Carré’s 2008 novel, it can’t but help bring back memories of that writer’s other spy-supremos, though control – to appropriate the title of the Dutch director’s first feature – is something that Bachman struggles for. When a washed-up young fugitive (the bearded-up Russian actor Grigory Dobrygin plays Issa Karpov) with Chechen bad back-stories emerges literally from the port city’s water, Bachman faces opposition in his intention to let things play out slowly, in the hope that wider leads may reveal deeper links.
On his side he’s got his devoted crew (leading German talent Nina Hoss and Daniel Brühl, both playing naturally in this English-language script, in which accents settle down after a minute or two), as well as his usual habits of informal, hang-in-there surveillance. Those calling for more immediate intervention include the official Hamburg intelligence chief (Rainer Bock) and Robin Wright as the impressively cool CIA agent in from Berlin.
Hoffman’s Bachman isn’t the only one with issues. There’s civil rights lawyer (Rachel McAdams) who offers Karpov assistance too, and nefarious banker (a queasily pukka performance from Willem Dafoe) with whom the Chechen has business of a kind that reflects only nastily on his own antecedents, as well as the protected hypocrisy of those with whom he comes to be dealing.
Corbijn brings his story together with considerable poise and holds back on the thriller front, at least until concluding scenes which reveal the lasting treacheries that lie behind these spy-land brief encounters. Our final sight in this desolate Hamburg is Hoffman losing it, in a cry-from-the-heart that must surely rank among the actor’s strongest moments. DVD extras here include a “Making of” featurette, and a wider historical portrait on the spy-city itself, “Spymaster John le Carré in Hamburg”.
