New movie review: A Most Wanted Man

Philip Seymour Hoffman leads a team of spies in A Most Wanted Man.

There are times when it is easy to feel sorry for ourselves and what we will never have. How many more great songs would Kurt Cobain have recorded? How many more great books would John Kennedy Toole have written? And how many more great performances would Philip Seymour Hoffman have given?

At best, these questions are unfair, and at worst, they diminish the value of the work we do have. Cobain gave us some of the best rock music of the 20th century. Toole gave us one of the most insightful comic novels ever penned. And Hoffman, well, that is another matter altogether.

With performance after performance in film after film, Hoffman elevated acting to the level of art. He was not simply one of the best of his generation. He set the bar for his generation. The work he left behind will be studied and dissected for years to come, and in Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man, he has delivered one final masterwork.

Based on the novel by John le Carré, A Most Wanted Man is an international spy thriller for the post-9/11 world. But this is not Jason Bourne or James Bond. Modern spy movies have become overly obsessed with the bomb going off, while showing little concern for the business of preventing it. Corbijn’s film, adapted by Andrew Bovell, finds the tension in that trade.

Of course, the pieces are all there for a traditional action-suspense film – shadowy government agencies, elite teams of spies, suspected terrorists, and figures of international high finance. Year after year, we have watched filmmakers assemble these parts into rote drama and uninspiring action. But the artists behind A Most Wanted Man find a new way to fit the puzzle pieces together, producing a picture of true depth and intelligence.

This will come as no surprise to those who have followed Corbijn’s feature film career. From the gorgeous biopic Control to the classically European thriller The American, Corbijn has an almost unparalleled facility for subverting genre. He eschews the shallow tropes and tricks of lesser films in favor of taking audiences on a trip into the murky depths of the human psyche. In Hoffman, he finds the perfect vessel for just such a journey.

Hoffman plays Gunther Bachmann, the leader of a team of spies tasked with tracking terrorist activity in Germany. As the film opens, Issa Karpov (played by Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Chechen convict, illegally enters the country after suffering untold tortures in a Russian prison. We learn that Karpov’s now-deceased father amassed a fortune profiting off terrorist activities, and Karpov has come to Germany to collect his money. Rachel McAdams plays the human rights attorney helping him in his quest, and Willem Dafoe is the banker who holds the key to the fortune.

As a Muslim with family ties to terrorism, Karpov becomes priority No. 1 for Bachmann’s team as they try to make connections to a larger ring of terrorists and their financial backers. Robin Wright appears as an American intelligence official with a keen interest in anything Bachmann’s team uncovers.

In short, there are a lot of moving pieces, as loyalties shift and motivations come into and go out of focus. Corbijn keeps these plot mechanics running smoothly as he delves deeper into what makes these people tick. While the action is an expert recreation of the business of spying on an unknown and unknowable enemy, the film comes most to life in the small moments that illuminate the characters.

As Bachmann takes a cigarette break on the balcony, he looks out over the land he has sworn to protect. It becomes clear that when you have made your life’s work the safety of an entire nation, work never stops. But in the modern world, the war on terror is increasingly borderless, meaning people such as Bachmann truly bear the weight of the world on their shoulders.

Hoffman slides into this milieu like a bullet going into the chamber. He plays Bachmann as a towering figure who still cannot stand taller than the bureaucracies that govern him, and when he tries to step beyond the walls, he finds only more walls. This is Hoffman at the height of his powers, projecting a weariness that only people who have seen the worst of this world can understand.

The performances all around are solid with McAdams a particularly pleasant surprise as a would-be idealist who cannot outrun a growing pessimism based on all she sees and experiences. One wishes Dobrygin had been given more to do as the most wanted man of the title. Too often he reads like a cypher onto which the rest of the characters project their own feelings about life. Still, Dobrygin does an admirable job of portraying a man so threatened by the world, he hardly realizes the threat he poses.

If the film has a flaw, it is the failure to address the implications of domestic spying or the ramifications of the war on terror. The introspection of the characters does not extend to the world they inhabit as it does in, say, the great German spy film The Lives of Others. It could be argued that these characters would not be able to see beyond their world, beyond the walls within walls, to take an objective view of the work they do. They simply are doing a job, and the onus is on the audience to parse its meaning.

None of this is to say the film is overly cerebral. The excitement is there, right down to an electrifying final sequence that will leave you gripping your arm rest. This is a smart thriller for smart audiences who crave substance as much as suspense. More than that, however, it is a fitting swan song for Hoffman, an actor who always gave us everything he had. How lucky we are to have received it.

See it? Yes.

On the color version of Alexander Payne's Nebraska

Bette Davis wears a red dress to the ball with Henry Fonda in the classic Jezebel.

“Keep Ted Turner and his God damned Crayolas away from my movie.” – Orson Welles on the possible colorization of Citizen Kane

The dress is brown. In an iconic moment from a near-forgotten classic, a Southern belle wears a red dress to the ball. She means it as an act of defiance but quickly regrets this decision. To prove a point, the target of her defiance – and the object of her affections – forces her to dance with him. The floor clears, and all the attendees watch the shameful display of the woman in red who has crashed their party.

The film is William Wyler’s fantastic Jezebel, a Best Picture nominee in 1938 for which Bette Davis, the belle, won her second Best Actress Academy Award. Henry Fonda plays the love interest. It is a classic epic romance of the time period, preceding even Gone with the Wind by a full year. The performances are grand, the scenery is lush, the racial politics are suspect, and it is, of course, shot on black and white film stock.

Colorization is a tragic business-over-art decision that has thankfully been avoided throughout the years, though there are any number of classic films available as candy-colored nightmares if you look hard enough. The true artists of cinema have always fought back against this kind of commerce-first decision making, including people such as Orson Welles, as evidenced by the quote that heads off this article.

It is hard to blame the money men. Black and white is a tough sell. I once knew a girl who refused to watch Casablanca because she did not like black and white movies. Best Picture winners The Artist and Schindler’s List are among the few exceptions, and for every one of those, there is a Good Night and Good Luck or a Nebraska the studio heads look at and say, “What if they had been in color?”

Well, this weekend, they get their wish. Epix, a cable movie channel you may or may not be familiar with, will air the colorized version of Alexander Payne’s wonderful Nebraska. It is a version that exists as a compromise between the filmmaker and the studio, which ever-concerned with its finances wanted a more commercial option. It is not the version anyone should see, nor is it the vision Payne and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael intended to communicate.

I urge you to avoid this version. Do seek out the film. You will not be disappointed. It is witty, charming, a little sad, and ultimately uplifting. It is a great film that landed firmly in my top 10 of last year, but what it is not is a color film.

The truth is: Red does not really read on black and white stock. The blood in Raging Bull is chocolate sauce. The same is true of the black and white sequences in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. And so too is Davis’ dress in Jezebel. The dress is brown because that is the art of shooting a film in black and white. The technology exists to make it red, but it would be nothing more than a coloring crayon representation of a classic film. The money men will always color their pictures, but that does not mean we have to hang them on our fridge.

New movie review: Calvary

Father James, as played by Brendan Gleeson, prays in a scene from Calvary.

The damage has already been done. When John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary opens, the past has already set the future in motion, and the present has no say in what is to come. McDonagh’s script has many preoccupations – religion, guilt, and forgiveness among them – but at its core, it is about inevitability and struggling to live a good life in the face impending doom.

Brendan Gleeson plays Father James, a Catholic priest in an Irish town that has seemingly lost faith, if it ever had it to begin with. The members of his flock dutifully attend church and take communion, but they are going through the motions. In confessional, one member threatens to kill Father James for crimes the Church has committed.

The unseen church-goer was sexually abused as a child by his priest, who has since died. But, he does not want revenge on a bad priest. With chilling certainty, he tells Father James there is no message but vengeance in killing an evil person, and instead, he will kill a good priest. That will make news, he reasons. Father James is a good priest and a good man. No one – not even among the faithless – refutes this, but his own goodness can redeem neither the town nor the Church.

This is McDonagh’s second film, following 2011’s excellent The Guard. Apart from sharing an inspired leading turn by Gleeson, both pictures are fables of one man standing up to do what is right because it is his duty and he has the courage to do so. It was clear from that first film McDonagh possesses immense talent, and with Calvary, he makes good on that promise by dialing back the comedy and turning up the existential dread.

There is comedy here, but it is that of closely observed moments and recognition of the folly of human nature, more so than outright jokes. And because the film opens under the threat of death, the blackness is never far from the viewer’s mind. This duality – the humor of life and the terrifying fact it will end – is where Calvary finds its strength, and in Gleeson, McDonagh finds an actor who embodies this contradiction and embraces it rather than fleeing.

Gleeson is a sturdy, somber presence at the center of the film and plays Father James as a necessary shelter in the storm of the world, if only someone would take him up on his offer. Gleeson is a big, imposing man, and he is not afraid to use his size to his advantage. McDonagh frames Gleeson in such a way that he towers over his congregation, and even at his lowest moments, the high ground in this village belongs to him and him alone.

Except when it does not. By way of transition, McDonagh often cuts to the Irish countryside – the shores, the fields, etc. – and in particular to one towering bluff. More and more of this mountain is revealed throughout the film, and it feels as though the hand of God is reaching out of the earth to remind us that no matter how tall we stand, He can stand taller.

We follow Father James in the week after the death threat is made. The would-be attacker says he will give the priest a week to get his affairs in order, then meet on the beach to kill him the following Sunday. Father James goes about his business, and from the start, he knows who is behind the threat. However, he does not turn this person in or confront him. That is not his place.

His role in the community – in the Church – is to lead this person out of the darkness and into the light. Father James takes this role seriously, and each day of the week, we watch the shepherd tend to sheep who have gone astray. While often showing due deference to the man who hopes to save them, they show no interest in returning to the flock, but he is undeterred. He stands steadfast in his field as the clouds of doubt hover overhead.

Among his flock are the atheist doctor, who represents science and logic, the promiscuous woman, who perhaps represents the Whore of Babylon, the foreigner, the philistine, and the prodigal, as well as several others. Each has a part to play and wisdom to impart, whether they know it or not.

Chris O’Dowd, known to U.S. audiences as the love interest in Bridesmaids, plays a seemingly ignorant butcher whose life revolves around chopping things to pieces. Dark and foreboding, he is brilliantly cast against type, taking already-stellar material and making it his own. Aidan Gillen, of Game of Thrones fame, is less against type but no less brilliant as a doctor who is openly contemptuous of the snake oil he believes Father James is selling. At the same time, he seems to relish having a worthy adversary.

Yet, as the whole town seems to stand against Father James, either in practice or in theory, he has one person standing in his corner. Kelly Reilly, most recently of Flight and the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes adaptations, plays Fiona, the priest’s daughter. She arrives in town after a suicide attempt, seeking some guidance but mostly respite from her tragic life. Reilly is a calming influence in an otherwise suffocatingly tense film.

While Father James has the specter of imminent death hanging over him, his daughter’s crisis seems trivial in comparison, but as she makes clear without realizing it, no crisis is insignificant to the sufferer. Father James knows this, and it is this bit of insight that allows him to carry on in the face of so much adversity.

“Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,” said Jesus on the cross at Calvary, this film’s namesake. Tellingly, the teachings of a forgiving Christ guide Father James, rather than the vengeances of a wrathful Old Testament God. He is turned away – politely and not – at every door he visits, but he continues to knock on each and every one.

The bubbling undercurrent of this film consists of the crimes of the Catholic Church and the abuses perpetrated by its clergy. The widespread sexual abuse of children by members of the priesthood constituted a breach of trust, the ramifications of which will be felt through the ages. The faithless did not simply lose their faith. It was shaken from them by the very people entrusted to strengthen it.

None of this is Father James’ fault, but it is made explicitly clear throughout the film that he represents the Church. He is the closest to God the villagers can hope to come, and as such, he represents the bitter betrayal of the Church’s crimes. They do not resent him but that for which he stands. Unfortunately, the two are one and the same, and the damage to both has been done. For what is faith without trust? But Father James remains, standing tall in the field and guiding his sheep into the fold. For what is a shepherd without his flock?

See it? Yes.