Movie Review: The American

LITTLE ROCK — The party line about Anton Corbijn’s The American is that it’s a very European-feeling movie, something more adult, sophisticated and minor key than the typically over-the-top sensations of Hollywood.

And it is. Part of the considerable pleasure I derived from the movie was no doubt due to the way it flattered my idea of myself as a cineaste.

Aside from George Clooney, you’re not likely to be familiar with any of the faces displayed on screen. It isa subtly beautiful film, all gaseous light and sound design, where long minutes pass without any dialogue at all.

Another thing they’re saying about the film is it’s a throwback tothe existential films of the early ’70s - I was going to compare it to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone (a connection Corbijn explicitly makes in one scene) but that suggests something more playfully cheesy than The American aims at.

It’s true that the titular character played by George Clooney is kind of a Man With No Name (actually he has two names, “Jack” and “Edward,” neither of which may be “real”) and no back story, but Corbijn isn’t overtly indulging any Quentin Tarantinoesque movie brat fetishes. (Though, I’m wondering if I didn’t also catch areference to Robert De Niro as Max Cady in the 1991 version of Cape Fear.) His style is compact, not baroque, and The American is more naturalistic than stylistically hard-boiled. It’s serious, but in a good way.

What the film manages to do, within a framework so generic that you can guess almost every turn of the plot, is ask some rather intriguing questions about the possibility of personal salvation. As you’ve no doubt gathered from the trailers andpreview stories, Clooney plays a very bad man in this film, and even if you go in knowing that, you might be shocked by the ruthlessness he displays in the film’s opening set piece.

Anyway, as a consequence he installs himself in a small medieval village in Italy’s Abruzzo region, to fade the heat. There he encounters Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), a priest of great bonhomie, and Clara (Violante Placido), a prostitute of gold heart. Each of these saints seeks, in their own way, to redeem Jack, who, in the hoary tradition of these kind of movies, accepts one final assignment. After that, he dreams, he’ll walk away.

And the final job doesn’t seem to be that difficult as these things go: His controller (Belgian actor Johan Leysen) tells him he needn’t do any actual wet work himself. All he needs to do is customize a weapon for a female assassin, Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). (They used to call hit men “mechanics” in the old movies and novels - it turns out our guy, who protests he’s no good with machines, is an actual one.)

Some people will find it slow, and there are an awful lot of shots of Jack’s back ashe wanders the narrow, labyrinthian streets of the village. Corbijn’s photographer’s eye is much in evidence and I was particularly struck by an early sequence where Jack, on his way out of Rome, drives through a green-lit tunnel toward a seeming static circle of white light. This may be a paint-by-numbers story, but Corbijn - who made his name as a photographer and director of music videos - is a realartist.

On the other hand, The American is a bit of a step back from Corbijn’s last movie, the well-reviewed and little-seen Control from 2007. That movie could afford to be outre because it was, to put it frankly, a movie that was pretty much assured of certain cult status (and not much else). However tragic his story, Ian Curtis (and the fact that some of you don’t know the name makesmy point) is obscure to most moviegoers.

But I didn’t get the feeling much was compromised in The American. It’s not a terrifically ambitious film, it’s relatively low-budget and there’s little in the way of flashy pyrotechnics, but it is freighted with certain commercial expectations. And having an Anton Corbijn movie actually competing in the marketplace seems to me to be a very good thing.