Let’s say this upfront: The American is not an audience movie in the generally recognized sense of the term.
It is not an action movie.
It is not a thriller in any conventional sense.
Forget about the TV commercials and theatrical trailers that make it look like George Clooney is playing some Jason Bourne-like character, mowing down every bad guy who gets in his way. It’s not that movie. Instead, it’s an art film. Anyone who goes in expecting it to be in any way a typical Hollywood product will be sorely disappointed. If Robert Bresson, the French minimalist, had directed a James Bond film, it might have turned out like this. Though Bresson favored nonprofessional actors, director Anton Corbijn has secured George Clooney to play the title role of a top-of-the-line professional assassin. But it’s a very different, more removed Clooney than audiences are used to seeing.
Things start well with a striking and intense confrontation in snowy Sweden, leaving three dead and Clooney’s assassin Jack on the run to Italy, where he meets up with the mysterious man who gives him his orders. Jack hides out in one of those Italian cities that’s all cobblestones balanced precariously on a hilltop, working on a weapon specially ordered by a mystery woman and frequenting a whorehouse where he repeatedly asks for the dark and beautiful Clara.
Sometimes he chats with the local priest who speaks almost entirely in platitudes, once in a while he has to fend off a Swedish attacker who’s linked him to the earlier crime, but for the most part Jack focuses on his weapons and chews gum while staring off into the middle distance. Just when you can’t abide another homily, Jack gets an assignment, and it’s a pip. He doesn’t have to kill anybody, he simply has to construct a high-quality weapon for another assassin, a mysterious woman named Mathilde.
Jack is someone who takes this kind of work very seriously (“I do what I’m good at” is as close as he gets to self-analysis) and watching him utilize his expertise and expend time and care on the job provides unexpected satisfaction.In many ways, he’s a less charming version of Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air, trapped in a profession where getting rid of people is hard on your soul.
Poor Martin Ruhe. If Corbijn put a little more pep into this film, perhaps it would have been possible to appreciate his cinematography. The guy clearly knows how to capture the best of the best in terms of the European landscapes and the minimalistic action, but the film is just so tedious and self-indulgent at times, his work practically goes unnoticed. Tarnishing Ruhe’s work further is jarring editing and the story’s disjointed nature. A number of angle changes are distractingly unusual and unnatural as is the way the story plays out. One minute Jack is in his room working on the gun, the next he’s in the midst of a sexual romp with Clara and then he’s looking over his shoulder at a possible Swedish assassin; nothing flows.
On the plus side, though, is Violante Placido. Played by Placido, Clara’s presence brings some life to both Jack’s existence and the movie as a whole, but don’t get your hopes too high up.
For while many of its elements whet our appetite and make the film well worth seeing (see the aforementioned trailers), The American doesn’t manage to deliver a fully satisfying meal. It’s against the film’s religion to have us believe too deeply in its characters, and that agnosticism, combined with the plot’s sense of predestination, put a noticeable crimp in its grand ambitions.