”A man can be reached if he has God in his heart.”
”I don’t think God is very interested in me…”
The trailers make The American out to be a Bourne-style actioner. However, it is more in the vein of the paranoid thrillers of the 70’s with the decidedly existential malaise of Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Pierre Melville.
George Clooney has oft been called a modern day Cary Grant. That same glib, debonair persona is on full display in the Ocean’s Eleven films and even the wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox. For The American, Clooney taps into the world weary persona he has perfected from pictures like Syriana, Michael Clayton, and Up in the Air. He is the masterless samurai, an anonymous killer akin to Alain Delon in Melville’s Le Samourai.
The movie opens in the snowy woods of Sweden where a gaunt Clooney, under the name Jack, shares a cabin with his girlfriend, Ingrid (Irina Bjorklund). Suddenly, they are attacked by assassins. The shootout ends in a horrific and utterly shocking manner.
Clooney tries to pick up the pieces as his handler, Pavel (Johan Leysen who looks an awful lot like Scott Glenn), sends him on a job in the mountainous countryside of Abruzzo, Italy. Staying in a tiny village, Clooney poses as a photographer going by the name of Edward. There, he is to build a customized rifle for a beautiful assassin calling herself Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). Edward inevitably disobeys his testament to avoid making friends. He strikes up a friendship with a chatty priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), as well as a budding romance with Clara (Violante Placido), a gorgeous prostitute. Clara calls him Mr. Butterfly due to a butterfly tattoo in between his shoulder blades.
The American was based on the 1990 novel by Martin Booth, A Very Private Gentlemen. The film was adapted by Rowan Joffe who penned 28 Weeks Later and is the son of Roland Joffe, director of The Mission and The Killing Fields. The script is surprisingly weak with a predictable ending and relationships that have been played out countless times. Leave it to Clooney to find the town’s one hooker with the heart of gold.
The film’s true strength lies with the almost immaculate direction by Anton Corbijn, a former photographer and music video director. The stunning black and white photography of Corbijn’s debut feature, Control, sets the stage for the work done here by Corbijn and cinematographer Martin Ruhe. He doesn’t shoot the laconic Italian village as a picturesque postcard. Instead, Corbijn explores the town’s every nook and cranny, transforming the expansive landscape into a claustrophobic maze of back alleys and winding walk ways. An aerial shot of the serpentine road into town adds to the labyrinthine feel.
There are scenes where Clooney sits alone in a bar or café. Corbijn constantly frames him off-center, uncomfortable, and pushed towards the corner to accentuate his sense of paranoia. While there is a tenderness to the love scene between he and Clara, they are shot in a static manner and flooded with a red light. Far more care and precision is given to the sequence in which Clooney assembles the rifle. Father Benedetto notices that Mr. Butterfly has the hands of a craftsman and it shows when he cobbles a suppressor out of old auto parts.
As the old adage says, patience is a virtue and The American is a film for the patient moviegoer. It’s a slow burn with the sensibilities of European art cinema. It may not be an entirely original picture, but it is still one of the year’s best.
Rating: *** ½
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