Spies World: A MOST WANTED MAN

Based on the book by John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man is another of his spy stories that turn on complicated clockwork plotting but play out as deliberately paced character studies. It’s what makes his Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a landmark for the genre. In Tomas Alfredson’s masterful 2011 adaptation of that novel, a Cold War-era British spy played by Gary Oldman quietly, methodically maneuvers a mole into the light of day. It’s a tricky, deeply felt work that sits entirely on the shoulders of its characters, watching for the slightest adjustments of body language to reveal undercurrents of emotion and truth.

A Most Wanted Man does something similar with the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final roles as Günther, a tired German spy stationed in Hamburg who goes about his daily life with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’s very good at his job and confident in his conclusions. There’s a quiet moment in which he consults with a United States operative (Robin Wright) at a café. He matter-of-factly takes a flask out of his pocket, pours some liquor into his coffee, and takes a sip, all the while laying out his plan to use an illegal immigrant (Grigoriy Dobrygin) to determine how a professor (Homayoun Ershadi) is sending money from his charity to terrorist groups. It’s risky, but it just might work. He’s so confident, he doesn’t need to hide his functional alcoholism from his colleague.

Director Anton Corbijn, whose last film was the gripping Le Samourai­-esque art house George Clooney assassin movie The American, sets the gears of the plot turning with considered patience. We meet several characters working with skill and precision, playing their parts in parallel plans that converge with the icy grip of Andrew Bovell’s screenplay. There’s a banker (Willem Dafoe), a human rights lawyer (Rachel McAdams), and several spies (Daniel Brühl, Nina Hoss, Mehdi Dehbi, Martin Wuttke). It’s all one big high-stakes chess game, people moving pawns into position, hoping to make it to the end with their careers, if not their lives, intact. But with this great cast and excellently controlled direction, the result is merely serviceable.

The espionage thriller moves slowly and confidently through its knotty plotting. Characters trudge about as pieces gradually drop into place. I could appreciate its terse, subtle character work from the ensemble and grimly chilly imagery from cinematographer Benoît Delhomme. But the movie remained firmly on screen. It never grabbed me or pulled me in. I was entirely unmoved and disinterested. There’s geopolitical specificity and lived-in performances, and yet it somehow feels fuzzy. We see actions and reaction, but little to impact the world beyond these characters.

It has to do with the point of view. While Le Carré’s methods of plotting are great for distant Cold War analog spying, making the cat-and-mouse genre pleasures a current War on Terror digital prospect grows disquieting. The film raises important questions without paying much attention. It shows us a broken world of imperfect systems and flawed people given horrible power and great responsibility. And yet it never grapples with this observation beyond the grist for character work.

We sit with the characters on their level, the better to see that these people have remarkable and frightening power. It’s upsetting, but played off as mere plot mechanics. A lawyer is grabbed off the street, thrown into the back of an unmarked van, and held captive. An innocent man never learns his apartment is bugged with hidden cameras. Hoffman’s character says he runs a secret department dedicated to going outside the law to keep Europe safe from terrorists. But his team has the suspects’ best interests at heart. A rival department just wants to spirit them away forever to some undisclosed top-secret interrogation detainment. In the end, we’re supposed to feel disappointment that things didn’t work out the way our leads wanted. It suggests that our civil liberties may be trampled at the slightest whim of an agent, but at least the good spies feel bad while they do it. Cold comfort.

Mystery Man: THE AMERICAN

George Clooney is often unfairly accused of coasting on his twinkly-eyed Cary Grant charm. That’s because even when he plays characters disaffected with their lifestyle or disconnected from human interactions, like in Syriana, Michael Clayton, and last year’s Up in the Air, his naturally stylish sparkle shines through. Looks can be deceiving, as they say. Though his characters may not always have things figured out, they can put up a good front, a distraction from the hollow aspects of their personalities.

In The American, Clooney takes this darker persona and pushes it into darker, subtler areas. Here he is less Cary Grant and more Alain Delon. As a graying professional assassin, Clooney is slim and weathered, with his expressive eyes taking on haunted qualities. Slipping into the role with startling ease, he finds great power in stillness and in economy of gestures. This is a character that is developed and changed so subtly and simply that a cursory glance could too-easily lead a person to mistake this quiet film’s contemplative nature for lack of interiority.

The film’s icy moodiness and chilled atmosphere is established in the opening Sweden-set moments that find sudden violence shattering the tranquility of an undisturbed snow-covered field. A mission has gone wrong, ending badly and deadly. The rest of the film follows Clooney to Italy where he hides in a small village as he prepares for his next job. As he sips coffee in small cafes, tinkers with metallic objects that will add up into deadly machinery, and moves deliberately through cobblestone streets, he comes into contact with three figures of shifting importance to the plot.

There’s a jovial local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) who takes an interest in this mysterious solitary foreigner and pleasantly offers conversation. There’s a prostitute (Violante Placido) from a nearby brothel who finds herself drawn to find the true man behind this secretive loner, her newest client. And there’s the eerily composed businesswoman (Thekla Reuten) who quickly and crisply delivers the specifications for a firearm that she will need from him in order to complete some unknown task of violence that he only wants to eventually discover from the newspapers. These three characters serve to both illuminate and reflect the nature of the inscrutable presence that is Clooney’s slick, mostly silent, and deadly cautious character. Otherwise, we would only have the carefully composed long shots of this single figure, or perhaps his vehicle, moving purposefully across a gorgeous, dominating landscape.

Though nominally a thriller, director Anton Corbijn is not too interested in fulfilling the genre’s requirements. His first feature, after work on music videos and still photography, was the 2007 Ian Curtis biopic Control, an austere, charily unfolding and somewhat distancing visual work that was nonetheless mostly successful in its goals. To The American, Corbijn brings a similar sense of a story sparsely sketched and coolly told. This is to the film’s ultimate benefit. On a plot level, the film’s script by Rowan Joffe is fairly routine spy stuff, falling back on clichés about heart-of-gold hookers and shady spy-like double-crossings, which are in turn hampered by some easy symbolism and on-the-nose dialogue. On a filmmaking and storytelling level, however, the film crackles with an impenetrable mystique that coats the cliché in a slick layer of cool, distinctly European atmospherics and a beautifully sustained mood of melancholy suspense.

All of Corbijn’s impeccable visual skill rests on the capable shoulders of Clooney, who ends up delivering one of his best performances, and the nicely nuanced work of the small supporting cast. This is a small, stylish, moody film that deserves to find an audience that is willing to be rewarded for patience and tolerance in watching such a smartly visual film quietly and deliberately unfold.