A Most Wanted Man - a film review
Ambiguity
is the lifeblood of espionage, a world of chiaroscuro where the melding of
light and shade leaves one feeling reeled from second and third guessing
everything and everyone – and the cost of a wrong supposition is often high. In
reflection of this, John le Carre, the author who worked for the British Secret
Service, weaves ambiguity into his novels whilst not imposing any easy or
obvious moral judgements, leaving it up to the readers to reflect on these. The
film translation of his 2008 novel, ‘A Most Wanted Man’, set in the post 9/11
world of moral and ethical opaqueness, traverses the land of ultimate
uncertainty through the eyes of a small party of people involved in the dark, dank, chthonic scene of espionage in Hamburg. It is a place where not only does one need
to unravel and anticipate the motives and thoughts of one's enemies who are
hell-bent on sowing death and destruction on innocent civilians, but one is also obliged to keep
a watchful eye on one's ‘allies’, who are by no means guaranteed to share the
same goals or stop at the same moral line in the sand, a line blurred in any
case by the extraordinary circumstances of this new confrontation.
A
young Chechen man, a devout Muslim, derelict, emaciated and wounded, appears in
Hamburg, an illegal refugee. He seeks refuge and help
from a young Leftist civil rights lawyer named Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams). The young man,
Issa Karpov, wishes to contact Tommy Brue, a banker whose father laundered
money for Karpov’s father, a Russian colonel with his fingers in many unsavoury pies
like people trafficking and drugs when deployed in Chechnya. Karpov holds a letter which verifies his
rightful claim to the multi-million Euro inheritance left by his father. Karpov’s entry
into Germany was noticed by a small but specialised group of German espionage
agents, led by Gunther Bachmann (Hoffman). The reason being that Karpov is an
escaped convict from Russia, having confessed to be involved in an Islamic jihadist
group, though the confession was gotten through torture. Bachmann’s group has
long followed and suspected a notable local Islamic moderate scholar and
philanthropist, Dr. Abdullah, of secretly funding terrorist groups through false
charities, though they lack conclusive evidence. In Karpov, Bachmann saw an ideal
bait to catch the fish and perhaps the even bigger fish behind Abdullah. Using
various methods and influences, playing with emotions, ideologies and human
drives, Bachmann’s team convinces Richter, whom Karpov trusts, to convince him to
amend for his father’s sins by giving the millions to charities through Abdullah's network.
Brue, who is also recruited, will then provide evidence through his bank that
Abdullah is channeling money to false charities who fund terrorist cells.
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| Richter and Issa |
Karpov himself is an abstruse young man. Half Russian and half Chechen who is a devout
Muslim. A man whose father is his mother’s rapist and whose mother died at the
age of 15 giving birth to him, a fruit not of love but violence and death. A
man who has been in multiple prisons in multiple countries and who has been
physically tortured but whose alleged affiliation to Muslim jihadist groups
remain obscure throughout the film. The ambiguity works well as his existence
poses as a test to the audience – what action is the moral one to take in dealing
with a man such as Karpov, who obviously deserves pity but who also incubate in him potential danger lurking beneath the ambiguity that may result in the deaths of
innocents? He, being the wanted man, is wanted in three senses, firstly as a potential
terrorist, secondly as a victim to aid and nurture and thirdly as an
important pawn in a bigger, deeper game.
The
man at the centre and whose performance dominates the film, though he doesn’t
play the titular wanted man, is himself an ambiguous man. Philip Seymour Hoffman,
who died earlier in the year at a lamentably young age of 46, embodies opacity
with his ability to portray guttural characters in an empathetic light. In his
life he was Janus-like, both a serious, talented, praised and sought after
acting talent and a man battling a life-long drug addiction that eventually ended
his life. His portrayal of Bachmann is yet another masterclass in acting. An
overweight, bedraggled man with a five-o’clock shadow at two in the morning and
seemingly never without a cigarette, Bachmann is a lonely man worn down by the
weight of his knowledge, actions, morals and the consequences of his role in
the shadow world. However, despite the air of weary defeat, Hoffman somehow
insinuates into his flat, gruff persona a lucid sense of intelligence, humanity and unshakeable
principles honed by a deep well of what one can sense to be extraordinary experiences. Moments
of silence speak volumes. A glance, a grim set of the mouth perfectly sketches
out the character’s bull-dog like determination, vexation and compassion. Fighting with
limited resources and a bureaucracy with paper pushers who has never, in his
words, seen blood on the streets, Hoffman has his eyes firmly set on not small
fries who can easily be replaced, but on the ultimate goal of disrupting
terrorist networks at their root.
In
contrast, Annabel Richter represents the young Liberal – well-meaning
but self-righteous and naïve, she did not in any way hesitate in whole-heartedly
aiding Issa, an illegal migrant, in claiming his enormous sum of inheritance
despite his not having any identification and despite the money obviously being
unclean. Meaningfully set in the city of Hamburg, Richter can be said to
represent something that has in recent years permeated the Western culture but perhaps most acutely in Germany. She embodies a naïve liberalism and compassion bred in
part from the inherited sense of national guilt. After the horrors, based on
race theories, of the Nazi’s, the West, especially Germany, has taken this lesson
very seriously and from it is cultivated the new culture of indiscriminate tolerance
of religions, ideologies and ethnic diversity – an attempt to make amends for
its past sins but which is now, through overcompensation, is causing its own
problems through mass immigration that is becoming increasingly lucid in recent
years. Furthermore, Hamburg is the city where Mohammad Atta, one of the
ringleaders behind the 9/11 attacks, incubated his plans and established his Al
Qaeda links. The tarnish on the German intelligence for failing to detect and
prevent Atta and others from committing the ghastly crimes in America puts it
in a vice of both wanting to make up for its recent failures but at the same time
atone for its blood-stained history by opening its doors to immigrants. To quote Smiley, another of le Carre's creations, "
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| Bachmann - played with wonderful gravity by Hoffman |
Shot
in a cold tone with mostly hand-held cameras and many close up shots, the movie
succeeds in creating a realism and involvement that enhances the story’s
believably. The very solid performances, especially the withdrawn gravity and charisma
of Hoffman and the good script and editing ensures that the dialogue-heavy
movie never sinks into boredom. The ending twist, which I won’t reveal, once
more rehashes the palpable ambiguity of the situation and is a not-quite-veiled
condemnation of American foreign policy and her procedure of extraordinary rendition. The film
ultimately succeeds in giving a realistic portrayal of the unseen undercurrents of the world
of espionage post-cold war and the new sets of ambiguities posed by the new milieu of war, not between states, but, like S. P. Huntington adumbrated, between cultures.
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