George Clooney & Violante Placido in the movie The American

The new George Clooney film "The American" is pretty. It's also pretty dour, even with all the luscious Italian Abruzzo mountain scenery, used here as a backdrop to the tale of an old school, one-at-a-time weapons manufacturer trying to get out of the business he's in, by way of One Last Score.

The movie exhibits a fastidious, nearly self-parodic sense of visual control. This is to be expected from the Dutch director Anton Corbijn, a longtime photographer who made his feature film debut with "Control," the black-and-white musical biopic about Joy Division's short-lived frontman, Ian Curtis. "The American" is in color, but its mood is gray. The protagonist makes a good, if justifiably paranoid, living by molding custom guns for assassins. Much of the picture focuses on Clooney in fabulous isolation, doing push-ups in his barely furnished flat, or assembling his latest instrument of killing in marvelous midday light (who works with greasy metal parts while wearing a crisp white linen shirt? George Clooney does!), or nursing a cup of coffee in some lonely cafe.

Dialogue? Not much of it, and what's there is terse. "It's Jack," starts a typical phone call. "I'm here."

"What do you mean, 'here'?"

" Rome." And because "Rome" has only one syllable, you know the conversation's nearly over.

Rowan Joffe loosely adapted Martin Booth's novel "A Very Private Gentleman," going his own way with the ending and stripping the story to its barest essentials. An effective prologue set in snowy, rural Sweden establishes the Clooney character's deadly line of work and manages within seconds to place its first naked posterior on camera (owner: Irina Bjorklund), lit by the glow of a crackling fire.

Fleeing Sweden, the man who calls himself Jack (and later, Edward) beelines to Rome and from there is dispatched to the Abruzzo area by his superior (played by the fine, deep-creased Belgian actor Johan Leysen). There, the Clooney character poses as a photographer and manufactures an assassin's rife for his exotic client (Thekla Reuten, looking like a refugee from the James Bond School for Comely Female Killers in Training) and continues his low-keyed interactions with the locals in his sweet little village. He receives one sort of companionship from the wily local priest (Paolo Bonacelli) and another from the prostitute Clara (Violante Placido), whom Edward does not know if he can trust.

Audiences who have been heavily Bourned and Salted by their thrillers lately might find "The American" a mite ... ruminative for their tastes. The movie is a paradox. It's ostentatiously restrained. You cannot say Corbijn lacks rigor. You can, however, say that when a talented director's approach too precisely mirrors the tightly calibrated performance strategy of his leading player, a movie risks stalling out completely.

I enjoyed the film for its surfaces most of the way. Its pictorial assurance is undeniable. So is its destiny as an audience-divider.

 

MPAA rating: R (for violence, sexual content and nudity).

Running time: 1:35.

Cast: George Clooney (Jack); Violante Placido (Clara); Thekla Reuten (Mathilde); Paolo Bonacelli (Father Benedetto).

Credits: Directed by Anton Corbijn; written by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel "A Very Private Gentleman" by Martin Booth; produced by Anne Carey, Jill Green, Ann Wingate, Grant Heslov and George Clooney. A Focus Features release.

The American Movie Review - George Clooney & Violante Placido