The American

I'm not really sure how I feel about The American. Slow-moving would be an understatement, but in a way I admire a director who's willing to take a tale of assassins and gunplay and give it such a glacial and beautific treatment. Anton Corbijn is a director from a musical background, his first feature film was the Joy Division biopic Control, and here he branches out with a stately piece of retro filmmaking - The American is a film with an aesthetic very much planted in the late 60s and early 70s, evoking classic golden-age American cinema like The Conversation or the European new wave. It's a style where the viewer is encouraged to get into the character's headspace rather than being spoonfed everything via dialogue and over-the-top mugging. Whilst I can appreciate films like this, and can also appreciate a fairly successful attempt to recapture this era, I just don't think The American really has anything original to say. The lonely assassin has become a fairly well-trodden cliche, as has the 'one last job' plot that goes with it.

George Clooney is cut adrift somewhat from his usual image in the character of Jack. It's a role with minimal dialogue where he's forced not to rely on his voice or his usual charm. It's a nice way for him to stretch his talent as an actor but it also isn't really that far removed from what he did for his Oscar-nominated role in Michael Clayton. He's at his best in scenes where Jack's naked paranoia overtakes him, with Clooney's good looks rendered pathetic with appalling fear. It's a fear that might drive him to even murder his only chance at love, but we only see a few glimpses of this. The main thrust behind The American comes from the idea that this is a man whose professions requires him to be lonely... but, alas, he can't help himself. As he embarks on his last 'assignment' (the construction of a specialist gun for use in an assassination) in a quiet Italian town he finds himself cajouled into something resembling a normal life - the local priest wears him down into a friendship, and a local prostitute awakens a tentative tenderness within him. Jack paradoxically tries to keep his distance from them whilst continuing to see them both.

There's a certain inevitability to the suspense as the viewer instinctively knows the dormant moral code of the film won't let it end happily. At the beginning of The American we see Jack act in cold blood, and English-language filmmaking simply doesn't allow such behaviour to go unpunished. So, despite the film's pretensions and artistic merit, it's still fairly predictable. Sure, the Italian location work is very pretty, and there are some nice scenes of delicate irony (such as the image of Jack and a female assassin talking shop over guns and ammo whilst relaxing on a picnic blanket in the woods), but at the end of the day it isn't an exciting film in terms of plot or character development. There's an interesting moment where the priest wryly says to Jack, "You're American - you think you can escape history", and it can be seen as an unintentionally ironic observation of the film itself. The American is a film that's trying to say something new but is unable to do so as it's still very much trapped by an American mode of storytelling. It's an unspoken production code that demands an anti-hero like Jack recieves a certain fate due to certain actions. It's safe, responsible storytelling... it doesn't reflect real life, and it's gotten to the point where this sort of thing is now almost formulaic.

DIRECTOR: Anton Corbijn
WRITER/SOURCE: Rowan Joffe, based on a novel by Martin Booth.
KEY ACTORS: George Clooney, Irina Bjorklund, Paolo Bonacelli, Johan Leysen, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth, on which this film is based.
- The character of Jack and his surrounding story echoes a long tradition of assassin-films that includes Le Samourai, Ghost Dog, Leon, Munich and Assassins.