A Most Wanted Man (Anton Corbijn, 2014) - a belated tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967 - 2014)

In belated tribute to Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967 - 2014)

Hamburg's most wanted

Reading Le Carre it's striking to see how much value he puts into stillness and silence. His most dramatic scenes take place in the most muted of places, where noise is not only not present, but unwelcome (I'm thinking of Smiley holding a handful of strings in the climax of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Alec Leamas being led away in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and then realizing what's going on). Silence for the Le Carre operative is a useful weapon--it draws out the target in an interrogation, forces him to fill the vacuum with noise of his own (hopefully valuable intelligence), deflects notice or attention from others in such a way as to leave the agent free to do what needs doing. More, silence is the mark of the thinking man, the intelligent man. You can easily believe Le Carre's hero (anti-hero, whatever) will slip past Bond or  Bourne while they ponder the best way to beat information out of their victim, then vanish before either flatfoot evens ha a clue.

Enter Gunther Bachmann, played with an almost Mandarin sense of mystery by the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Bachmann was a big deal once; he operated networks in Beirut which, thanks to American interference, were exposed and destroyed; now he's haunting the streets of Hamburg, picking up detritus here, there, linking one bit of information to another in a series of daisy chains that--hopefully, hopefully--will lead to some significant target. Someday. 

Have not read Le Carre's novel; hear from some critics that it's somewhat strident in its protests towards the United States' policy of extraordinary rendition, with its portrait of rude crude American intelligence agents, its story of a one-time torture victim (based loosely on the experiences of Murnat Kurnaz) seeking asylum in the West. Anton Corbijn's adaptation of A Most Wanted Man is in my book anything but: like his previous The American, it's less a story than a study, not of the refugee but of the gruff unshaven German espionage agent tailing him, trying to suss out the young man's role in the city's uneasy geopolitics (Le Carre's boorish Americans have been distilled into the far more ambiguous figure of agent Martha Sullivan, played with sinister silkiness by Robin Wright).

George Clooney in The American was pretty much the whole show; here it's Hoffman, and good as Clooney was (an introverted knot of tension in an otherwise obscure film, with a rather cliche shootout for a climax) Hoffman holds you in a ruthless grip. He slouches, splashes whiskey in his coffee, smokes an endless chain of cigarettes (you could believe he'll die of cancer long before an assassin's bullet) and in a German-accented growl, declare that he's doing all this "to make the world a safer place." Corbijn keeps the camera not exactly zoomed in on him--Hoffman's constantly caught in long or medium shot, the director doesn't seem to believe much in closeups--but aware of him somehow, pointing him out as the dilapidated corner in an otherwise aseptically clean German city. 

And it wouldn't work--would be another American, imploding with its own inwardness--if it wasn't for Le Carre's crackerjack script. Fitting in detail after patiently acquired detail, Bachmann constructs a compelling picture: of wealthy Abdullah, possibly contributing to a charity secretly channeling funds to terrorist networks. As with Le Carre's best spies Bachmann plays the long game--prefers the barely-seen objective over the more immediate goal--and the author works the same way, saving the revelations for last, increasing tension incrementally with every turn of the screw. Quite an achievement, I think, that the film's best thrill involves a man with a pen hovering over a sheet of paper, trying to decide whether or not to sign.

What follows--the capture, the quick flurry of guns and agents and shrieking vehicles--is almost anticlimactic. Bachmann seems aware of this too: he's most alive when staring at a video of the target pacing her cell, or peering past a crowd at the man haunting a street corner. The hunt is all, he seems to be saying (in the book is "Bachmann's Cantata," a long and angry summation of contemporary geopolitical history which Corbijn (wisely, I think) leaves out; Hoffman's Bachmann as opposed to Le Carre's is almost inarticulate in his secretiveness); all else is denouement, disappointment, despair. 

A powerful conclusion, but Corbijn arrives at it the way Bachmann--the way Le Carre himself--does: by patient accumulation of detail, by understatement and subtle contrast. Like his collaborators Corbijn plays the long game, his gaze fixed on the distant objective somewhere in a barely-glimpsed future. 

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Spies, Inc.

After the international success of Lat den ratte komme in (Let the Right One In, 2008), Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson decided the next step in his career was to put aside vampires in exchange for spies.

And damned if he wasn't right. The twilight realm of vampires isn't quite as eerie as the half-lit realm of international espionage; the undead figures lurking in the margins of the former, their souls irretrievably lost, aren't quite as haunting or perverse as the half-alive figures lurking in the latter, their souls irretrievably corrupted. Werwolves and vampires? Pfft. Try lamplighters, pavement artists, honey traps and wranglers, not to mention the much-feared scalphunters. John Le Carre (pseudonym for David Cornwell) was an officer in both MI5 and MI6; he eventually used variations on the terminology spoken in his workplace to help paint the gray world of his novels.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, published in 1974, is the first third of what is generally considered Le Carre's masterwork, The Karla Trilogy. The novel tells the story of former spymaster George Smiley, dragged out of retirement to root out a possible mole--an 'undercover' or 'deep penetration' agent who has risen in the ranks and now helps run The Circus, Britain's secret service (so named because the services' fictitious headquarters are located at the famous junction). His former boss Control had narrowed the suspects down to five people before he died (of a broken heart, some say), and given them corresponding codenames: “Tinker,” “Tailor,” “Soldier.” Skip “Sailor”--sounds too much like “Tailor;” reject “Rich Man” for being inappropriate and substitute “Poor Man” instead. Smiley himself was (and I'm sure the irony wasn't lost on Control) “Beggarman.”

That's it, really, the entire premise (partially based on the true case of real-life double agent Kim Philby); all the complexity that follows is just Le Carre jumping back and forth in time and space to piece together the narrative, odd bits of knowledge painstakingly collected that, paradoxically, Smiley already knew in one form or another; he just was never able to bring himself to work the puzzle (the novel you might say is one long, jumbled hunt Smiley conducts in the thickets of his memory). The challenge of any adaptation, of course, is to translate this complexity to the small or large screen, transfer it so its greatest trick is preserved: that at the right moment the whole thing falls away to reveal the simplicity, the elegance of the mystery's solution.

The first adaptation of the novel was done for the small screen, directed by John Irvin and starring the late Alec Guinness. It ran for over three hundred minutes; Alfredson's 2011 version runs for a little over a hundred and twenty.

It's easy to beat up the latter with the former--to my mind, still the definitive version. At six hours, the mini-series had room to breathe, to follow Le Carre's vision more faithfully; Guiness in turn had room to carve intricate detailing into his role. He had a beautifully modulated voice (it was as if his larynx was fluted) and he could sound like a weary bureaucrat or relentless schoolmaster, sometimes alternating from one to the other within a line of dialogue--this mix of self-effacement and strength was so influential Le Carre reportedly modeled Smiley more and more on Guinness' performance in the subsequent novels. 

Director Irvin's straightforward approach helps ground the story in an everyday world; when asked what The Circus' offices looked like, Le Carre noted that they resembled the BBC offices--whereupon Irvin filmed some of his interiors there. The result: greater authenticity at (presumably) considerable savings, with a possibly unintended but nevertheless potent point--that intelligence organizations are essentially bureaucracies, are as faceless and joyless and impersonally malevolent as any other government or corporate entity. They are us, basically, only more so.

The length, the look, the feel of it was of a piece--how could a feature improve on this? How could maverick actor Gary Oldman improve on Guinness? Apparently they didn't try; the filmmaker gives the film an entirely new image, magnificent Edwardian-style buildings refitted to serve as offices somehow aestheticized, made to look beautiful--all faded red brick, pitted stone, stained green steel (look carefully and in one shot you can spot an open pit surrounded by railings, the floor below teeming with staff). For the Circus archives Alfredson presents an ant-farm view, layer atop layer of flooring and library shelves in labyrinthine cutaway, full of people scurrying right and left carrying files (Is the image digitally created? Where does he find these amazing locations?). Not, perhaps as grimly realistic as the BBC offices, but ravishingly decrepit.

Against this gorgeous decayed backdrop Alfredson uses a series of motifs. The suspects are represented by chess pieces with tiny photographs taped clumsily to their necks; Control's fall is represented by repeated flashbacks of Budapest, and the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux (his crooked body lying on the street echoes Control's body lying crookedly on the side of the hospital bed). In the mini-series the Circus' rumpus room, its holy of holies where four of the suspects meet, is an anonymous conference room with antique (or faux antique) wood chairs; on film Alfredson has an entirely different conception--a large space lined with what at first glance looks like a ghastly checkerboard pattern, in that shade of unnatural orange made popular in the '70s. On closer inspection the checkerboard is even more bizarre--orange foam sculpted in corrugated patterns to dampen sound, helping proof the room from all kinds of eavesdropping. The effect is unreal: entering it is like entering another world, where time has stopped and potent spells (or state-of-the-art technology, same difference) have evoked an enchanted cave of sufficient security and quiet (or at least the illusion of security and quiet) to allow one to scheme, and map out a plan of action.

Film theorist David Bordwell in a series of excellent posts compares Guinness and Oldman's Smileys, noting that Guinness is like an old pedagogue explaining each turn and twist of the intricate plot; Oldman's Smiley is a more opaque creature, his mouth hanging absentmindedly open, his glasses obscured by reflected light. He keeps his cards so close to his chest you begin to project your own thoughts and feelings on his tabula rasa of a face. He's a more brusque Smiley, though (possibly because he has less time?); he pressures his bosses and victims till they both crack. He's an angrier version of the character (as angry perhaps (or so Bordwell believes) as Le Carre must have felt towards Philby), but the anger is banked, hidden, so as not to alarm others. We really see that fire only once, when Smiley finally confronts the mole; for the most part it's like a steam engine thudding away relentlessly behind steel plating--you sense it more than you actually see it.

I look at Oldman and despite Bordwell's insistence that it's a variation, I do see a lot of Guinness' Smiley in him; I doubt if Oldman can avoid this (Guiness did help shape Smiley's future incarnations). Oldman's approach basically is to preserve the mystery of Smiley, somehow give us the sense of a man hiding the rage inside him--the rage burning like thermite through the length of a foreshortened story. 

Is it different? Alfredson takes the liberty of having his aged spymaster take the occasional dip in a heated outdoor pool (presumably with other retirees), and it's startling to see Smiley, who one pictures as a shapeless mass of flesh wrapped in thick tweed, paddle his way across the steaming water, his receded chin breaking surface like a ship's prow. Smiley in swim trunks? One shudders.

At one point Smiley confides to his torchbearer Peter Guillam (Benedict Cumberbatch) about the time he actually met Karla, and here for once the film exceeds the series--where Irvin made the conventional choice and showed the encounter in a flashback, Alfredson stays with Oldman who, using nearly all the text from the equivalent passage in the novel, sketches what happened.

Gradually an image emerges from Oldman's words. Alfredson's camera slowly glides around Oldman, the lenses fixated on him, giving us the sense of someone (Guillam, perhaps) watching--of someone unable to look away; Oldman gazes at no particular point, and as he speaks we realize that he's gazing not at anything before him but rather at something behind him, in the distant past. His gaze becomes so intense you actually feel a third presence in the room with eyes every bit as implacable, a ghost almost (believe it or not, I could feel the hairs on my arms stiffen and rise), a living if insubstantial memory mocking him with its inscrutability. 

That's the moment when I finally bought into Oldman's Smiley, the moment that made me understand: this Smiley held a vendetta of a kind against Karla and was determined to root out the mole. 

Is the film better? Not definitively, no; I'd call this a summarized, stylized version to the mini-series' expansive, more truthful one. I'd call Oldman's Smiley an enigma nursing a relentless (if repressed) bloodlust to Guinness' more empathic mandarin. One takes different pleasures from one, dwells on different flaws from the other. On its own, though, I can say this of the film: excellent interpretation, and one of the best features of last year.

First published in Businessworld, 3.23.12