Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man marks the final leading role for Philip Seymour Hoffman. The Hoffman on screen in A Most Wanted Man isn’t dead yet, but there’s an uncanny feeling watching him play a self-destructive dick, who drinks and smokes and punches lowlifes in dive bars. Hoffman’s character has walked off the pages of John le Carré, which is to say he’s a career spy, the conflicted man of an artful airport novel. Hoffman’s tailing a Chechen refugee (Grigoriy Dobrygin) suspected of harbouring terrorist connections; McAdams the ‘kid’s in over her head!’ lawyer; Dafoe a banker blackmailed into taking part in a sting.
Being the 21st century, A Most Wanted Man swirls post-9/11 tension, high finance trading, and gentrification into its cosmopolitan, multicultural milieu. Through this landscape wanders Hoffman, a man scarred by the past and half checked out on the future. His fatalism is an attempt to safeguard him against disappointments, but still they inevitably come. Le Carré is out to chronicle spying as any other workplace: one in which bureaucracy, politicking, and self-interest win out over the more noble notions of the work. It’s, sadly, a little too symbolic of Hoffman’s own work, both within the film and across his career: the actor suffering on behalf of an industry that shares little of his virtuous zeal.
