A Most Wanted Man REVIEW
Gunter Bachmann runs a counter-terrorism unit in Hamburg, Germany. His stated goals involve making the world a safer place. Those ends justify a lot of skullduggery and manipulation of his assets – assets that he recruits tenaciously. Here is how Gunther describes his work:
“You're looking at me, at us, but we don't exist, not legally, not officially, because German intelligence needs a job to be done that German law won't let it do, so me and my people, we stay small. We stay on the streets. We make the weather. Our sources don't come to us. We find them. We become their friends, their brothers, their fathers, their lovers if we have to. When they're ours, and only then, we direct them at bigger targets. It takes a minnow to catch a barracuda, a barracuda to catch a shark.”
Gunther, it turns out, is good at what he does. In the John LeCarre’s novel the film is based on Gunther justifies all the various ways that he has at his disposal to get his informants to cooperate with his operations. “We don’t ask him to become a traitor,” he says, “We offer him a new definition of loyalty.” In the course of this particular episode in counter-terrorism, Gunther manages to get a son to betray his father, a human rights lawyer to betray her refugee from torture client, and a Muslim philanthropist to betray himself. Gunther’s MO is to always use the pawns to get to the knights and the knights to get to the bishops and the bishops to get to the queen and the queen to get to the king. Gunther understands that most of the characters in that series of dominoes are not evil and not conspiring to do serious damage to the world.
He is after the sharks.
Little does he know that he himself is just a rook in someone else’s game himself – someone who may not have the same noble goals that he has for motive.
Question for Comment: Have you ever betrayed someone, seen someone betrayed, or been betrayed? Do you think you would do well in a job where most of your daily work involved betrayal?
Comments