Review: A Most Wanted Man

City Paper grade: A-

Anton Corbijn’s moody Le Carré adaptation gains inevitable, and almost unbearable, poignancy from featuring one of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final performances. (All that remains is Mockingjay, although he died before its completion.) But had he never played a role other than Günther Bachmann, he would still have been one of his generation’s greatest actors. Günther, whom Hoffman plays with a heavy German accent and a heavier weight on his shoulders, is the head of a secret German intelligence unit that operates in the moral and legal netherworld. As he explains while barely suffering the questions of an oversight panel, “We make the weather.” Hoffman plays the line as a statement rather than a boast: He may wield power, but he does it without vanity, beaten down by a past error that cost the lives of several informants. Although A Most Wanted Man is set in the present — or at least emphatically post-9/11; echoes of the Hamburg cell are everywhere — Corbijn strands the film in a gray nowhere, the better to depict a landscape that no one, least of all Günther, knows how to navigate. The plot, which involves tracking down a Chechen militant who may have trained with Islamic terrorists, is relatively low stakes by espionage-thriller standards, but that’s entirely to the point: What changes there are to be made will be small, and even those will come at a cost. The drama is about personal integrity and trust, not ticking bombs and rogue nukes. Though there’s not a shot fired or a body dumped, it’s still thrilling, because Günther’s struggle is never farther away than Hoffman’s magnificently worn face.