The American

Celebrity portrait artist Anton Corbijn started off his film career with dynamite by directing the 2007 film Control. Posing as a generic rock star biopic depicting the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, the film truly plays best as a heartbreaking kitchen sink drama and the tragic character study of a young victim to stardom. Like Control, audiences might be deceived by what The American appears to be; it's not your regular high-budget Hollywood assassin thriller, but rather a slowly simmering portrait of a man living in a cold and isolated hell he has made for himself with his career. What he does requires much quiet concentration and very little visibility of himself, though the consequences of his line of work end up being both loud and noticed. Despite its title, it is born out of a clear influence of the distinctly European thrillers of the 60s (like the French Le Samouraï). Despite him posing as a photographer named Edward to Italian pedestrians, George Clooney's character is really a trained long-time assassin named Jack. Despite being a priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) had fathered a bastard child in his past. The film is very dependent on the notion of things not being what you first perceive them to be, and of how deceitful perceptions (long-term or short) can really be.

The film opens with a long wide shot of the cold Swedish landscape. We hear nothing but the whistling wind to complement the piercing white of the snow highlighted with cloud-veiled sunlight. Here we find a burly bearded Jack with a woman he later describes as "a friend," vacationing in a small wooden cabin. They walk out into the snow to discover a mysterious set of footprints, those probably not of hunters because they usually travel in twos. Suddenly, the serenity is disturbed by a shootout that Jack survives. However, in the fallout, he's forced to shoot his lady friend out of fear of a setup. He's ordered to stay low for in the discreet Italian countryside while higher authorities sort out who's after him.

The opening demonstrates the tonal approach to the film, in which the quiet patience that slowly unfolds the story actually intensifies the gripping tensions in the few action scenes there are. Every shot fired leaves you breathless, working to scare you away from the violence portrayed as opposed to the stereotypical "American" film that glorifies it and appeals to you through your adrenaline level. The camerawork throughout the film, like the opening, generally tries to show you everything. Uninterrupted shots of the beautiful European locales in which the film was shot dominate some scenes, like the Swedish snow or the lusciously warm greens of the Italian countryside. Cinematographer Martin Ruhe's work here is much less flashy than his last Corbijn collaboration in the black and white Control, featuring tons of light and shadow play. Here, Ruhe trusts the natural lighting of these unbelievably beautiful places which will be tarred by the ugliness of human action set forth by the story — the concept played symbolically when the beautiful prostitute Clara (played by Violante Placido) takes a nude swim in the sparkling stream until she painfully steps on a bullet left in the water.

The few scenes of actions do actually move rather quickly and the camera and editing work is more expectedly flashier, like the nighttime shootout between Jack, another hitman, and an unexpected motorcyclist caught in the crossfire. In the end, to its credit, these scenes are less noticed and remembered than the more mannered and disciplined method applied to the rest of the film. However, at its worst, the general scheme of editing and camerawork keep the film static; going through very long stretches at a slug-like pace with little to no development. For example, we are let in pretty early on of Jack's longing for an emotional and physical connection with someone, a privilege not offered to someone of his line of work, but perhaps the film spends a superfluous amount of time exploring that aspect to his character while adding little else in substance. The screenplay attempts to compensate for these long stretches with sometimes thought pondering and philosophical dialogue exploring various themes of the film, but oftentimes the dialogue is very heavy handed and unfortunately less subtle in communicating its ideas like the rest of the film's execution. We see this most clearly in the priest's musings on men living closely to hell and thirsty for redemption.

Much like the Hollywood icons before him who defined their era, George Clooney stays close to his acting comfort zone playing a charmer with a difficult occupation undergoing an existential crisis. He does the shtick as well here as he has in films like Syriana, Michael Clayton, and Up in the Air. I think it may be that time in his career to stray from his established film and public persona a bit the way James Stewart did in Rear Window or Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (alluded to in The American) before being considered as great as those actors symbolic of their time. The actresses in the film (Placido, Reuten, Björklund) do a good job of maintaining a steaming allure to them in the vein of Hitchcock's best femme fatales.

The film is not very mainstream friendly, and most audiences who made it surprisingly number one at the box office last week probably left very angry. It's not the glossy fast paced thrill ride we've come to expect out of Hollywood — it's a much slower meditation of this man and his career. A filmgoer who enjoys taking the time to ponder a film as it unfolds should be engrossed for most of the duration of this film. It may not be entertaining in the sum of its parts, but The American works as a thoughtful and meticulously crafted study of a character himself meticulous to his craft.

Grade: B