The American (2010)

Must See Movie...

It is a performances centric movie

Don't Believe the Hype

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

An assassin wants to quit. I expected a slow build up and frantic development. I got a frantic beginning and a slowly paced drama. The assassin is dead inside and starts to live again because of a woman. A priest nudges his thoughts. Unusual pacing and hardly any action.

Sometimes a George Clooney movie is excellent ('O Brother Where Art Thou'), quite good ('Michael Clayton') or moderately entertaining ('Up in the Air', any of the 'Oceans'), etc. Which is why I had no reservations watching 'The American'. Simply put...huge mistake.What looked promising in the opening ten minutes turned out to be THE most exciting scene in the entire movie. Many adjectives can be applied to this film, and none of them are good ~ choppy, anticlimactic, boring... Perhaps the crux of 'The American' is that so many story lines remained open and unexplained at the conclusion of this disheveled mess for 'artistic sake'. I just found it to be a cinematic waste of Clooney's obvious acting talents.Who knows, perhaps he was offered a fortune to take this forgettable role and that's why he did it. It certainly wasn't to enhance his body of work. In the end gave the flick a VERY generous 3* out of 10, only because both he and the scenery were enjoyable to look at.

The American is a taut, minimalist thriller reminiscent of Le Samourai (1967). The life of an assassin is a lonely one, filled with personal rules to survive through the line of work. Much like the technical thought in building his customized weapon, the film itself is stripped down to a stark realism, and the soundtrack is mostly filled with a large void of ambient noise and silence.This might be surprising to some, but The American's plot structure and themes are extremely similar to the much more popular Drive. Released almost exactly a year before Drive (both had a September opening), The American follows a similar lonesome working professional who finds love. Note how both Clooney's "Jack" and Gosling's "Driver" rely on the bare minimum to live. A table, his tools and craft are all he needs to get him through the day. Both movies contain minimal dialogue, and what is spoken is pretty much straight to the point.There are some differences in the main characters. Jack is more about constant suspicion to survive the risks in his profession, whereas the Driver has more loyalty to those around him despite their untrustworthy character. Both main characters commit acts of violence, but the Driver's are more grisly and one of Jack's isn't justifiable. Drive is treated with a romantic glossiness, blaring catchy 80s inspired music and staging beautiful dramatic slow motion set pieces. The American has a colder approach, with realistic short action sequences, more brooding and visualized nuance. Most would prefer Drive, which in its own respect is a solid film, but watching The American is at the very least a comparable piece that differs in presentation and approach.

Here I am again, again at odds with the great and the good, all of whom seem to think The American is a marvellous film, as do a great many reviewers here. There are, of course, those - 'that's two hours out of my life I'll never get back, dude' and '20 bucks well wasted' - who think the whole thing is boring rubbish, but I'm not with them, either.The problem is that Dutch director Anton Corbijn tries to do something quite specific and simply doesn't carry it off: he seems to think that long, moody scenes where nothing happens except good ole' George Clooney gazing into the middle distance equate with meaning. That's what happens in all the films he admires and attempts to emulate, right? Well, no it doesn't. Or rather, yes, it does, if you can carry it off. Some do, but Corbijn - to my mind at least - misses by a country mile. And as this very slow film shades from improbability to impossibility, it begins to lose whatever goodwill you might have felt when you were a little intrigued by the initial setup. To be frank, the final ten minutes see the whole enterprise inexplicably degenerate from would-be art-house fodder into pretty damn mediocre TV melodrama.For Corbijn's film to work, even if he insists upon cramming it full of pseudo-meaningful languid scenes - in fact to justify all those pseudo-meaningful languid scenes - he must at least do the groundwork, prepare us, the viewers, in such a way that we accept almost without question, for example, the love affair between the nameless American assassin from nowhere and the rather too gorgeous tart. How he goes about doing so, I don't know, but some directors do and pull off what would be a high-wire act. Corbijn does not.I didn't buy the assassin and the tart falling in love and I didn't buy the philosophical talk about sinners the assassin has with the local parish priest. It doesn't ring true and as it doesn't ring true, the film simply fails on the level at which it wants to succeed. Clooney's American is simply too mute to be capable of forming a relationship with the tart or a friendship with the priest.In his meetings with the priest he says so little, I was surprised the old codger invited him for supper. There is no reason whatsover why he should be in the slightest bit interested in this man from apparently nowhere. As for the tart, she, too, I'm sure would have enjoyed a little more chat. In my experience women rather like that sort of thing. Perhaps she knew she was in a moody would-be art-house film. You never know.OK, if you want a thriller, you get one, and if you want mystery, you sort of get one, but I wanted Corbijn to deliver on what he promises, and he just doesn't.There are several glaring instances of outright sloppiness: this all takes place in Italy, a country I know a little, but its Italians are curiously mute. Usually, they are hard to shut up. Then there's the curious lack of interest the local police show in the obvious murder of some guy or other (we're told it's 'one of the Swedes' - more rather spurious mystifying) after a car and Vespa chase. Word would surely have got around about the mysterious American who arrived a few weeks ago who claims to be a photographer but he doesn't take any pictures at all. And he would have been one of the first the local rozzers would have called upon.But there you go: Corbijn's would-be Euro drama has got some of the pieces, but even those slot into the wrong spot. He simply fails to carry off what he attempts. Sad, but true.