'A Most Wanted Man'

Saying Farewell To Philip Seymour Hoffman

The last films Philip Seymour Hoffman worked on were the Hunger Games Mocking-jay pictures,, but just before he left this world and the filming of the young adult confection, he finished this film which is bit of a tour de force performance. Because the entire marketing of films has become so centred around youth there was nary a whimper or whisper as this film came and went at the cinemas.  It's a sombre film with very stark, quite unflattering lighting, but the story is the star with this one and it really is a bit of a gem.

Spoiler alert, just in case I let something out of the bag.

What's Good About It

It's a film with a very understated style and the performances are very controlled, adding to the tension and emotional claustrophobia. The first 10 minutes are a little disorienting because you spend a bit of time piecing together just who you are watching and why. The film features some interesting character actors apart from Hoffman and Rachel McAdam does a pretty good job of playing the liberal-leaning lawyer who gets to be thereat in the sandwich.

A lot of the plot is subtle and the problematic seems to exist on a very abstract level. This is a good thing because all too often we get regaled with plots so heavily delineated that it leaves nothing to the imagination. Teethings left unsaid are as important as the things said in this film and so the performances matter greatly. It's a very satisfying film that way.

Hamburg as a city sets an interesting backdrop, and the staged scenes that result have a very distinct look. It's nice to get away from the usual spy movie fare of CIA in Virginia and a deliberately dusty, miserable Beirut or some messy Middle-Eastern urban landscape.

What's Bad About It

It's not so much what's bad about it, but more what is dissatisfying about it, is the niggling sense that we've watched something to do with events of absolutely zero consequence. That, after the film is over and you ponder the meaning of the characters and the plot, you get the feeling that the futility seeps right out and infects the entire enterprise.

Maybe that's the point of the film. That we employ a large intelligence and counter-terrorism force to keep people employed, and not much else. Of course, things do have a way of happening.

What's Interesting About It

The day after I watched this film, there was the hostage incident in Martin Place. It appears the radicals are a lot harder to track in real life. The expert proficiency with which the team isolate and together targets is somewhat contrary to how these things seem to unfold in real life. We give our government institutions too much credit when our fiction portrays them as such paragons of efficiency.

The really blurry area of intelligence and counter-terrorism is the human element and the capacity of human beings to commit to tasks. In that sense the film over-ascribes to people's will power, capability and commitment. The schema of the predictable behaviour in humans is actually a bit of a furphy in these sorts of spy films. If the motive is so obscure we have to guess at it, then it is likely not going to sustain the narrative drive in a visceral way. The film at times becomes very abstract in parts.

If one had to conjecture, the guy who held the Lindt cafe in Martin Place, would probably have had solid, material motivation for doing what he did. It wouldn't have been terribly obscure or hard to describe.

The Assumption of Torture

Part of the narrative progresses with the implicit understanding and solid assumption that state organs torture their captive terror suspects in order to gather information. Atlas in this fictional space, there is no deeper discussion about how the Russians or CIA do their business of getting intelligence from uncooperative people.

We live in a certain kind of world where we doublethink our way around the fact that these agencies do things that we in our middle class moralism would find objectionable. The film paints this as 'the real world' and while we don't see it, it is accepted as part of the real world that prisoners in the war against terror get tortured. It's Orwell's '1984', but with brighter colours. The recent report on the CIA ostensibly blows a lid on this kind of thing but ultimately our world seems to accept this collateral damage to our conscience. We don't get deeper into a mechanism for peace because it would demand we totally re-engineer our politics, but there are too many vested interests in politics staying the way it is.

The character Gunther played byPhilip Seymour Hoffman is searching for that door, but he cannot articulate it, much less communicate it to the CIA representative. The State apparatus cannot move towards a live-and-let-live position. So we are left with the frustrating denouement.

The Grubbiness Of Adulthood

Part of the real world in which Gunther inhabits is a world of moral ambiguities and even ambiguities in professional and private affections. Philip Seymour Hoffman does an amazing job of portraying a man who is on a mission trying to preserve some semblance of propriety in a business devoid of propriety. He is in the business of saving lives while baking some lives; but he is tired of the destruction the business brings. It's a masterful performance.

Rachel McAdam plays a rather down-beat lawyer that matches up in dourness, but is much too innocent and naive to see the war on terror as a gigantic state machine that would dwarf individuals. Hoffman's Gunther offers a portrait of the unthinkable working through the problem - on a limited budget no less - and navigating the very grey areas of ethics and policy. Duty and futility sit side by side as he convinces the young lawyer that the world of politics demands the world of espionage. The more one knows, the more one becomes an adult in the real world, and the more grubby our souls become. The option of staying idealistic simply does not work. The film is a towering work of pessimism, held together by Hoffman's finely nuanced performance, and that is where the viewing pleasure lies.

In that sense it is a very mature, adult kind of film - sort of rare in this day and age of super hero comic book movies and Hasbro toys movies. As swan songs go, this is a mighty effort from Philip Seymour Hoffman.