'A Most Wanted Man': Springtime for Gunter
The nearly infallible Philip Seymour Hoffman lives up to the nearly in A Most Wanted Man, miscast as a German spy.
"A MOST Wanted Man" is based on a John le Carre novel, possibly titled "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy With a Really Bad German Accent."
I regret to say that the accent belongs to the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, starring here as Gunther, a German spy working to snare a possible terrorist financier, all while bucking bureaucrats and his own come-and-go accent - the movie is mysteriously in English, though almost no character in the movie would claim it as a native tongue.
Other North Americans stranded in this high-toned episode of "Hogan's Heroes" include Willem Dafoe, as a Hamburg banker, and Rachel McAdams as an activist lawyer working to help an illegal Chechen immigrant (Grigoriy Dobrygin) collect an inheritance and gain citizenship.
Is the Chechen a terrorist?
What will he do with the money?
Can it be used to attract terrorist moneymen?
All these questions are answered in due time. Actually, in overdue time. Meanwhile there are shots of world-weary spies swirling scotch, referring to That Thing That Went Wrong in Beirut, talking the way Le Carre spies talk, about how to balance cynicism and duty, how to keep incompetent colleagues from making bad situations worse. The plot moves about as fast the Cold War.
Hoffman's an actor who could do just about anything, but being authentically German is not one of them. We know he can be a spy - he was wonderful in "Charlie Wilson's War" - but this movie takes that role and drains it of all humor and energy.
Le Carre himself took to the New York Times this past weekend to defend Hoffman's accent, saying that it sounded bad at first, but became authoritative thanks to the force of the actor's performance.
Nice try. And reminiscent of Mark Twain's famous reaction upon hearing Wagner for the first time and finding it awful, until an erudite person explained that the music is "not as bad as it sounds."
It would have been nice to see what a real German, like Daniel Bruhl, could have done with this role. He's in the movie, by the way, playing a German intelligence officer subordinate to Gunter, in a role that curiously does not require the recent Oscar nominee ("Rush") to speak much at all.
None of this would matter so much if we were swept up in the story, but it's at once numbingly slow and transparent. The ending will surprise no one who's ever read Le Carre.