PSH was less a quick study than a prompt mirror image of how JLC could have tortured his own character further.Ī Most Wanted Man is not thrilling like young adult dystopian fiction. Gunther Bachmann, burly and imposing on paper, came out on film a chapped fellow with a sickly pallor, hoarsely calling the shots. Thankfully, there’s another character tucked into a quieter Le Carré book whose every wrinkle PSH can possess. But we’ve previously made up our minds that Gary Oldman is the most up to par successor to Alec Guinness to date. The late actor could have been a perfect George Smiley, albeit American. John Le Carré didn’t even recuse himself in the casting of his film adaptations where PSH was concerned. In this part of the world, Plutarch Heavensbee might go down as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s most memorable ultimate role nevermind that the Hunger Games’ sneering gamemaker has nothing on the complexity of an emotionally handicapped German spy in A Most Wanted Man. Did he or did he not furnish the seed fund for the great Cojuangco wealth ? Some compelling history questions cannot be tided over by the disclaimer « fiction based on facts ». But if we’re stirring some sort of internal debate here, between love of country and love of class (because love of self is just as easily eaten up by the two), then maybe we should hold the figure in question for his actions on the matter, not his musings. Films could get caught up in the poetry, which is fine if we’re at the altar of a literary figure. And that’s why the romantic, « personality approach » to hero films might not poke at the holes in our history. I’m not sure that is deserved, in the same way that I have always been a Rizal skeptic. But towards the end it might have done cultish favors to the historical image of Heneral Luna.
The film is cold water to our hero worship, so often in the mold of what the late Renato Constantino calls “Veneration Without Understanding ». If we continued on this unflattering path, we could finally succeed in changing street names that honor collaborators.
Heneral Luna has his craven moments, Apolinario Mabini could be no different from today’s trapo for his dispirited but complaisant attitude towards the elite, Filipino soldiers don’t have the appetite for battle, and so on. This is a shame because overall, the film considers skepticism. Lends the grating populist sheen that usually triggers my allergies to Pinoy hero movies.