The American

The American tries to be a character study about a lonely killer for hire who has also become a target. He's to do his last job in a small Italian village while needing to watch against “the Swedes”, whomever they are, who want to kill him. This is an incredibly deliberate film. It is driven more by suspense and paranoia than car chases and gunplay. It moves extremely slowly without a lot happening--an inaction movie, as somebody said. But it held my attention and didn't bore me. It succeeds in that.

Clooney is a professional killer simply known as Jack. The earliest scenes open in Sweden. Jack escapes unknown enemies by killing them before they kill him. His boss or handler, a mysterious, somewhat grizzled white-haired man, Pavel, masculine and hardened, sends Jack to a mountain village in Abruzzo. He is to custom-make a gun for a beautiful female assassin and stay one lethal step ahead of who would kill him. That latter is made shadowy in a movie where shadow and unknowing and sudden malevolent bursts of violence have thematic resonance: living by a code informed by the kill or be killed, detached and lonely world in which Jack lives and operates. As Pavel tells him "Don't make any friends." As Jack tells the garrulous priest who befriends him, I paraphrase, "I always have a reason for what I do." In this, there is some derivative Hemingway.

Jack spends a lot of time, shown in painstaking detail, building that gun. But the director, Anton Corbijn, creates taut moments out of Jack’s isolation and legitimate fear that virtually anyone he sees might kill him. Corbijn creates tension out of silence. In a small nod to Dogma, there is hardly any soundtrack music, just long silent stretches as Jack builds his weapon or sharpens bullets or walks through the village or sits warily in a café. In one scene, set in the woods, Jack and his client, the beautiful, sexy killer, test the gun. Paranoia kicks in. The audience is compelled to wonder which of them—if either—will shoot the other first.

Clichés, however, undermine the movie. Jack visits a prostitute. She’s super model looking and is sympathetic. They fall in love. Jack, as noted, wants out: this will be his last assignment. And, at the end, after asking her to go away with him, so they can be together “forever”, he dies just short of dying in her arms, after having had it out, in a final shoot out, with Pavel. (Here exists one piece of stupidity in the movie. Why does Jack, shot and bleeding to death, insist to himself on driving to meet his new love, the prostitute, at their prearranged spot in the woods rather than take himself for some medical help?) By the way, of course, Jack studies butterflies as well as being tattooed with a big one, spread symetrically across his back. To the two women he’s concerned with–the prostitute and the beautiful killer—he is Mr. Butterfly. His butterflyness, no doubt, is to contrast with the lethality he embodies and which informs the code he lives by.

Within the frame of film’s stillness and really deliberate pace, the danger grows. As it does, Clooney’s face, always in the movie a grim, glaring, taut, staring mask--intense, yet static—grows even grimmer and even more intense as Clooney’s facial presence dominates the film. There’s nothing wrong with deliberate pace. But The American is sparseness as emptiness. Consistent with that emptiness and the noted clichés is the movie’s portentousness: portentiousness as pretentiousness. Jack is portentuously reminded that he’s an American: “You’re an American. You think you can escape history", which contrasts with the scene in which Once Upon a Time in the West plays on a bar TV. Or consider the priest who befriends Jack and tells him, with great gravitas and deep wisdom, that hell is a certainty for Jack because he's living in it, or Jack telling the priest that all men are sinners.

The more I think about this movie the more diffident I am about it. On balance I liked it and woould recommend it. it's interesting. I score it at 3 stars out of 5. It nods at the world it tries to depict. It doesn't explore it so much as seem to explore it. Nor does it gain real insightful purchase on it. I maintain that Clooney acts with particular skills but his acting is limited by his inability, in contrast, say, with the magnificent Sean Penn, to get beyond essentially who he is. The American, like Clooney's acting, finally, is more about cool surface than hot depth.