The American, review

George Clooney plays a killer of few words and much mystery in a film that elevates mood and restraint above drama. Rating: * * *
By Sukhdev Sandhu
Dir: Anton Corbijn; starring: George Clooney, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli. Rating: * * *
The American is a European film. A very European film. Its Dutch director, Anton Corbijn, has at his disposal all the elements of a thoroughly modern action thriller: a good-looking hit man who’s never far from comely beauties, cloak-and-dagger machinations, scenes full of guns, blood-letting and chases. Yet what emerges is far from being a Bourne knock-off. If anything, it’s closer to Wim Wenders’s The American Friend (1977) or Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999), both of which pay homage to – and meditatively deconstruct – noir crime fiction.
George Clooney plays Jack (or is it Edward?), an American assassin holidaying in Sweden with his girlfriend. Then he’s discovered by agents. He kills them, his girlfriend too, and flees to Italy. There, in a small village that is as pregnant with mystery as it is picturesque, he occupies himself with what may or may not be his last job: custom-building a high-velocity rifle for a glamorous client (Thekla Reuten). Who she is or what she wants it for: this is not our business to know. The same goes for those other men tailing Jack: we never find out why they’re doing so or who their paymaster is.
The American, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, is a film that prizes mood – more precisely, moodiness – over drama. Its director, who started out as a photographer, and whose pictures of Joshua Tree-era U2 and Depeche Mode fashioned grey, serious-faced mythologies of those bands, is excellent at framing his subjects.
Together with cinematographer Martin Ruhe, with whom he collaborated on the Ian Curtis-biopic Control (2007), he has crafted a good-looking and elegantly composed picture whose potency lies mostly in its generic restraint.
German musician Herbert Gronemeyer offers a delicate score, but the most important element of the sound design is silence: it’s a rich and multi-textured silence that encompasses brooding masculinity, existential loneliness, the snowscapes of Swedish winter. When it’s punctuated by dialogue, the spell is broken. A typically gauche speech comes from the local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who complains to Jack: “You Americans. You think you can escape history. You live for the present.” Other scenes also veer towards being parodies of European arthouse cinema.
It seems unlikely that such a petite Italian village would house the bordello portrayed here, far less one staffed by quite so many lovelies, all of whom seem to enjoy their jobs very much. One of them is Clara (played by the fantastically named Violante Placido) who is given many opportunities to show off her curves, and who even has the pleasure of being pleasured by Jack. Soon she’s contemplating giving up prostitution, while he’s planning to retire from the game. It’s all a bit – what’s the word? – unlikely?
Clooney, while he never manages to wring as much depth from his character as we might like (there may not be any to wring), reprises the tetchy restlessness he drew on for Syriana (2005) and Michael Clayton (2007). “You have the hands of a craftsman, not an artist,” the priest tells Jack at one point. Clooney’s art in The American lies in his making the most out of very little. When it comes to thrillers, pensive pulchritude can be as beguiling as sweaty agitation.
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