Film Review | The American

I’ll do you a favour straight away: going into the latest George Clooney flick, don’t expect a gripping thriller. In fact, Anton Corbijn’s The American bears closer resemblance to Clooney’s recent, Oscar darling Up in the Air – an existential parable wrapped in deceptive Hollywood glitz (just substitute the romance with gunplay).

But you wouldn’t know this from the film’s marketing campaign, which sets up expectations of a more broody James Bond… or rather, an instalment of the Bourne saga with prettier locales.

Jack (Clooney) is a lone assassin specialising in custom weaponry. When a job in Sweden goes awry, he is relocated to the Italian countryside, where he is given what seems to be a relatively straightforward task: build an effective sniper rifle for a contact, Mathilde (Thekla Reuten).

Relishing his downtime in the Abruzzo mountains, Jack befriends a local priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), with whom he engages in pithy spiritual dialogue over wine, while also frequenting the beautiful prostitute Clara (Violante Placido).

As Jack begins to entertain the prospect of romantic fulfilment, the bad guys from Sweden return, and his Italian assignment grows more and more complicated… and potentially deadly.

A Dutch photographer responsible for the image of U2 and Depeche Mode – as well as the latter’s video for Enjoy the Silence, along with Nirvana’s Heart Shaped Box, and the 2007 biopic of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Control – Corbijn deliberately sets out to make high art… and this in itself hamstrings him from the word go.

I suppose that, with its minimal dialogue and emotionally cold protagonist the film was meant to evoke the still-brilliant thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville (the Alain Delon-starring 60s classics Le Samourai and Le Cercle Rouge), but unlike the films that supposedly influenced him (and this includes the Westerns of Sergio Leone, which are explicitly referenced) Corbijn’s project just chooses to bypass the basic pleasures of a genre piece, while still utilising its basic tropes.

This is the worst kind of lazy artsy-fartsydom, and it’s precisely the kind of thing that gives non-formulaic mainstream films a bad name.

For a far more effective take on a similar concept (not to mention Italian flavour), tuck into Paolo Sorrentino’s The Consequences of Love – where the theme of loneliness is fully fleshed out, and you’re not made to expect shootouts and a ‘satisfying’ genre payoff, only to be disappointed.

But the good things about the film are a joy to savour. And no, I’m not talking about Violante Placido spending 90% of it in the buff (OK maybe I am).

You certainly can’t fault Corbijn for his visual sense – the film is beautiful, each shot a perfect example of crisp composition, allowing us to enjoy the sumptuous photography while adding to the overall sense of foreboding that envelops our broody protagonist.

And Clooney’s efforts are all the more admirable because we know how much stock he usually puts in his Cary Grant-like demeanour.

Here, he is about as far away from effortless charmer as you can get – we barely see him engage in a full conversation – and you can almost feel the effort he makes to suppress his go-to tropes as he’s assembling guns, looking tired, and serving up grim ripostes to the priest inexplicably concerned for his soul and… not much else.

And this is the film’s ultimate snag: for Clooney’s character to get top billing and eat up most of the running time, we need to remain interested enough to go along with him.

But with nothing to go on but broody one-liners, how are we expected to? Ultimately, Corbijn expects the premise to do all the work for him.

Perhaps the transition from still images to moving ones is not so smooth after all.