A Most Wanted Man

Somebody from The Village Voice once said--it might have been Alan Scherstuhl--that there wasn't a single movie that wasn't improved by featuring a Philip Seymour Hoffman performance. As I sat in the theater watching A Most Wanted Man, I felt like a scout, looking for those moments in Hoffman's performance when something distinctly him emerged. For a while, I was worried, because the film is so subdued and so deliberately paced, I felt it might unintentionally blanch the normally colorful acting of this great, sadly now deceased performer. But, Hoffman "showed up" as it were, injecting little pieces of his big, unpredictable, yet somehow always structured, acting persona into a character that is mostly calm, organized, quiet, cautious.

Hoffman plays Gunther Bachman, a German intelligence agent relegated to a super-secret and decidedly small sub-organization that was created to bypass German laws in searching for terrorist operatives. Bachman lives with the grim guilt of failing to prevent 9/11 from happening (it was planned partly in his city, Hamburg). So now he's more focused than ever on nabbing potential terrorists. When a man (a suspected terrorist) named Isa Karpov flees Chechnya seeking asylum in Hamburg, it becomes a race between Bachman's group and the mainstream German intelligence to catch him: At first, their mission appears to be in sync, but soon Karpov's guilt is called into question. He seeks aid from a compassionate German lawyer named Annabelle Richter (Rachel McAdams) who works for a non-profit organization that aids people like him. She believes in his innocence, but Bachman isn't so sure, and both German and American intelligence agents are sharpening their knives and waiting to go in for the kill.

Like 2011's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, this latest adaptation of a John Le Carré spy novel is slowly paced but in a way that thoroughly pulls you in. The world of this film is quite fascinating, and the movie lets us savor it, think inside it. Even though there are many entertaining James Bond-esque movies (most recently, Skyfall), you don't always get a sense of the environment or of the characters and how they are affected by their work. (Although Skyfall is certainly an exception.) Both kinds of films have their place. However, the second kind, the deliberately slower kind, is in decidedly shorter supply. But perhaps this makes those of us who like these slower spy movies more grateful, possibly even less demanding of the films when they do appear. And yet, I was prepared to pronounce A Most Wanted Man boring and confusing for about the first 20 minutes. But soon after, I was hooked, and felt invested in everything that was going on. And there's nary an explosion to be seen in the entire film. What a refreshing thing it is to have another adult movie about spies. The ending is shattering, the characters all too human, and the film highly worth watching. 

With Willem Defoe, Daniel Bruhl, Robin Wright, and Grigoriy Dobrygin. Written by Andrew Bovell. Directed by Anton Corbijn.

Top Hat

As Top Hat (1935) opens, we're face to face with the entrance of some upper-crust men's club where an imposing sign reads, "SILENCE must be observed in the club rooms." The camera zooms in on this sign, not because it thinks we're not paying attention, but because the camera itself in Top Hat is playing a kind of joke and inviting us to partake. Cut to Fred Astaire, noisily reading the paper and disrupting the well-worn quiet of the otherwise aging gentlemen occupying a very large room full of tall upholstered chairs and warm, cozy fireplaces. A butler treads noiselessly over the carpet with a tray of drinks, but again, Fred Astaire keeps making a mockery of their reverentially quiet room by sneezing, coughing, and turning the pages of his newspaper. Somehow, this irreverent spirit feels completely and delightfully fresh, as though Top Hat had been released yesterday, and even when the movie slips into the occasional poky scenes, there's a vibrant spirit to the comedy and the music numbers that still works. (The film ends up in Venice, but the Venetian set resembles the Small World ride at Disney World more closely, as my friend put it.)

When Fred Astaire makes love to Ginger Rogers, she only half-heartedly turns him away. She doesn't really want him to stop, and it's a lovely kind of movie-going pleasure to see her grin appear, only a little at first, as he sings ridiculous love songs to her and tap dances all around her. The mistaken identity plot--which may feel somewhat weather-worn simply because it's been done so many times since--still amuses, especially with the aid of Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick. Broderick may be one of the most liberated women you'll ever see in a movie, although there were lots of them in the 1930s. It's only in the last 20 or 30 years that we've put women in the movies back in prisons. Top Hat is also a lot smarter and more sophisticated than the Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies that it spawned. They too used to mistake each other for someone else, and although those sudsy love comedies are certainly fun and charming in their own way, Top Hat works on a different level: it's blithely conscious of the fact that it's only a movie. Directed by Mark Sandrich from a script by Allan Scott, Dwight Taylor, Ben Holmes, and Ralph Spence. The songs are of course by Irving Berlin. With Erik Rhodes, and Eric Blore, and Lucille Ball who has a bit part as a flower shop clerk.

Broadcast News

Broadcast News (1987) was written and directed by James L. Brooks, one of the creators of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which may be the greatest sitcom ever made. Brooks returned to the newsroom comedy format with Broadcast News, but with far less success. The characters in this film--there are three main ones, played by Holly Hunter, William Hurt, and Albert Brooks--somehow seem more sitcomish than the characters on Mary Tyler Moore, who were richly developed even in the show's first season, and became even more layered as the show progressed. It's apparent that Brooks, who transitioned into movies after decades of working on the small screen, was unable to create characters who worked on a cinematic level. Instead, each of them is a kind of mishmash of various yuppie traits and psychological problems.

The film opens with short introductions to the main characters as children, showing us the traits necessary for their future careers manifesting themselves even in grade school. Hurt's character, the handsome but intellectually inferior anchorman, struggles even then to compete at an academic level, and complains that he'll never succeed in life because people only like him for his looks. Holly Hunter's character, a Southern girl who's already planted in front of a typewriter, shows her spitfire zeal for telling stories and seeing beneath the surface of communication, and Brooks's character is the typical egghead kid that nobody likes.

So the film establishes these rather obvious characters and then sets them at work in a newsroom together. But it's difficult to believe that William Hurt struggles to keep up intellectually, especially because he comes to Holly Hunter, who's the producer, and complains to her that he doesn't measure up. Somehow, his self-awareness and his ambition to improve make him a less interesting character. He's almost a Ken Doll of banality. If he were Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, the lovable narcissistic buffoon, we'd at least have something to laugh at.

And Albert Brooks, who made a pretty good living in the 80s playing cynical, sarcastic, smart yuppies (see Lost in America), grates on the nerves. His cockiness is a turn-off. He's more obviously arrogant than William Hurt's character, who may hide his arrogance behind a mask of fake-humility. However, he's intellectually honest, and the movie and James L. Brooks want us to prize this above all other qualities. And that's why Holly Hunter's character is so torn between the two men: One of them is handsome and "needs" her to help him be a better thinker, and the other one is smart and goes out of his way to value her as his equal. But these are such cookie-cutter 80s characters, and in so many ways, Broadcast News is such a cookie-cutter 80s movie, that I found myself increasingly less interested in the whole affair.

With Joan Cusack, Jack Nicholson, Robert Prosky, and Lois Chiles.