A Most Wanted Man

Slap a few horns and halos on characters and A Most Wanted Man resembles less a political thriller than a morality play, albeit one with angels and devils arguing the finer nuances of post-9/11 geopolitics while perched upon the shoulders of men. Adapted from the John Le Carre novel by Anton Corbijn, the film populates the purgatorial port city of Hamburg with those wounded by the war on terror: refugees, failed spies, idealists gone to seed. Warring tribes of spooks keep watch over two Muslims who occupy vastly different spheres of the social order. Abdullah is a prominent community leader who preaches tolerance while bankrolling violence; Issa is a Chechen washed ashore after fleeing Russian oppression, and his motives remain inscrutable beneath his shell-shocked demeanor. Anti-terrorism agent Gunter Bachmann (Philip Seymour Hoffman) tries to tempt both men towards redemption, while the U.S. attaché prefers the far simpler route of damnation. It seems you can believe in salvation all you want, but there’s no guarantee a higher power will match that faith. God is an American, and the Old Testament is clearly her foreign policy manual of choice.

But while the U.S. agent behaves as expected, Bachmann’s motives remain inscrutable for much of the film, hidden behind his wan smile as he parrots the American line about making the world a safer place. Even if he believes that cliché, his methods clearly have been deemed eccentric and naïve by his peers. Allusions to past mistakes appear again and again—the word “Beirut” is repeated several times like a penitent’s prayer—and suggest Bachmann may be more interested in saving his own soul rather than redeeming his targets. How else to explain his occasionally baffling need to offer these men the choice of amnesty over the threat of deportation? Elaborate state surveillance apparatuses typically do not spring up out of a government’s kindliness. Yet if Abdullah and Issa can be given better lives—or more accurately, coerced into accepting them—then perhaps the entire sick system can be redeemed. All of the deception and damage done in the name of peace and safety can be, if not forgiven, at least excused as ignoble means securing a noble end. If not, then Bachmann must confront the fact that he is but one more tendril of a creeping police state. The crushing final scenes of the film suggest that any such redemption is beyond reach for the man. Prisons, of course, are not built to set men free.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The time is the early 1970s, and deep inside the paranoid cocoon of Britain’s Cold War-era Secret Intelligence Service, the news of a mole inside the upper echelons of the agency is slowly corroding all sense of what is real and what is not. It’s a strong hook, and good thing, too—the first half-hour of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will likely appear incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the John Le Carre novel from which the film is adapted. This would be a dense narrative under any circumstances, but the early establishing scenes have a clipped feeling, as if the filmmakers had resolved to adapt every second chapter of the book and then hoped the details would somehow sort themselves out. Thankfully, they do, and Le Carre novices (like myself) will find themselves eventually forging the connections neglected by the filmmakers. Indeed, everything flows together gracefully enough that one begins to wonder if the early awkwardness was really due to clumsiness or was actually meant to evoke a sense of disorientation befitting this duplicitous world (a little of both, I suspect).

It helps to have such a deep lineup of talent on the cast—led by the esteemed Gary Oldman and his glasses—with fine character actors penetrating into even the smallest roles. This might seem like a strange compliment, but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy possesses one of the most homely casts I’ve seen in a mainstream film in recent memory, even with Colin Firth screwing up the bell curve. So many wizened, weary men, their worry lines slicing through their age lines, and then seemingly rubbed in an extra layer of dust and sadness—every face is a desiccated monument to a life of hard choices. The whole film echoes that sense of drabness, right down to the perpetually overcast skies and each dowdy detail of the production design (were the 1970s really this brown?). Director Tomas Alfredson could easily be accused of overindulging in the retro-chic, except that the style seems at least as important to the film’s purposes as its spy-counterspy machinations. As the mole notes, his betrayal “was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one.” A glib characterization of the Cold War, perhaps, but the film makes a case for it. The decaying western world is safeguarded by the moral compromises of its decaying protectors, and whatever you may call this sad sight, "pretty" is not likely a term that comes to mind. How else to rationalize the image of a balding, pasty middle-aged man dancing in paisley and ruffles? The loyal soldier commits many crimes in the name of war—against fashion, as much as anything else.