‘A Most Wanted Man,’ With Philip Seymour Hoffman

An inescapable melancholy pervades the espionage film “A Most Wanted Man,” a smart, bluntly effective adaptation of John le Carré’s post-9/11 political passion play about good, evil and the sins committed in the name of national security. It’s no surprise that the weight of that day and its aftermath hangs over the story, which finds expression in the atmospheric gloom of Hamburg, the port city in which most of the story unfolds, and in the movie’s assembly of crushed and deflated souls. Most of all, there’s the presence of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Günther Bachmann, a German intelligence officer and man of sorrows driven by his uncompromising belief in himself.

The movie has been shrewdly customized by the screenwriter Andrew Bovell and directed by Anton Corbijn, who have managed to make the story seem both topical and redolent of an earlier espionage age, partly by turning it into a character study. This is the last movie completed by Mr. Hoffman, who died in February, which invests it with a gravity that could easily have overwhelmed a less practiced director. Here, though, Mr. Hoffman’s intensity is well served by Mr. le Carré’s intricate web-weaving and Mr. Corbijn’s complementary visual style, the sinister doings dovetailing with the dark tone and colors. Mr. Hoffman’s performance is so finely etched — and the story so irresistible — that the film becomes, almost inescapably, something of a last testament.

Published in 2008, the novel opens with Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin in the movie), a bedraggled Chechen who enters Hamburg illegally with a harrowing past, a wad of cash and a mysterious, symbolically freighted key. Given to feverish outbursts liberally punctuated by exclamation points, Issa is at once a man and a metaphor, his body crosshatched with scars that testify to his agonies in a Russian prison and foreshadow the torments to come. It isn’t long before Hamburg’s clandestine forces have trained their sights on Issa, transforming him from a haunted man into the hunted one of the book’s stinging title. Gradually and inextricably, Issa is drawn into a tangle of competing concerns and spy agencies, including a secret intelligence branch run by Günther.

Issa is a far more recessive and less vocal presence in the movie, more ghost than man, and he’s soon overshadowed both by Günther and narrative complications. This may be a function of filmmaking habit, specifically the routine compression that turns hundreds of book pages into a two-hour movie; Mr. Hoffman’s dominating presence may also have been a contributing factor. Whatever the reason, this shift away from Issa in the movie means that, by accident or design, the story — along with its intimate and larger meanings — settles on Günther. Issa may start out as the title character, but as the camera lingers on Günther’s bowed head and hunched shoulders, the burden of the West’s policies and politics seems to press down on him with the heaviness of Atlas’s globe.

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With a strong story as his foundation, Mr. Corbijn is able to cut loose visually, and he floods the screen in “A Most Wanted Man” with washes of burning color, including an acid yellow and cold blue — tints suggestive of sickness and death — that transcend the usual action-film cliché because of their beauty, intensity and emotional reverberations. Here, characters talk the procedural and expository talk, but their interiority is often expressed by their surroundings, like the lushly green park that nearly enfolds Issa’s young lawyer, Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams); the glass house occupied by Tommy Brue (a very good Willem Dafoe), a banker and one of the tale’s walking wounded; and the derelict, trash-strewn street where Issa finds refuge with a Muslim family.

Some of Mr. Corbijn’s choices, like the Hitleresque sweep of black hair that Robin Wright wears as Martha Sullivan, an American intelligence officer with the wolfish smile of the professional seducer, are overly telegraphing and only underscore the less subtle, more schematic parts of Mr. Le Carré’s narrative. Yet even when the geopolitical pieces start lining up too neatly and Issa’s hands stray into Annabel’s, the movie holds you with the force of its moral outrage, the talent of its supporting cast (including the German actors Nina Hoss, Franz Hartwig and an underused Daniel Brühl, all speaking in accented English) and the intensity of Mr. Hoffman’s performance. Even when Günther verges on fading in a haze of cigarette smoke and intrigue, Mr. Hoffman is insistently present.

“A Most Wanted Man” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There’s the usual adult language, none of it remotely shocking.