"The American" is sufficiently out-of-step with today's cinema that you almost can hear its distributors holding their breath, hoping George Clooney's action pose on the poster will lure viewers in before they know what they're getting.
What they're getting is an existential crime movie with violence, chase scenes, sex and exotic locales, yes - but also one offering long stretches of silence, a leading man who has intentionally turned the lights out on his charm and a worldview that starts off bleak and sticks to its guns.
Clooney plays a hit man at the end of his career, the brusque, lone-wolf Jack. When assassins track him to the Swedish cabin he shares with a lover, he kills her without hesitation after eliminating them - just, one assumes, to clean up the loose ends.
The movie, based on a novel by Martin Booth, is never going to explain who wants Jack dead or why. (A mysterious death is awaiting all of us, we realize; it's just pursuing Jack a little more intently.) Instead it offers his period on the lam in rural Italy as a portrait of loneliness and postponed self-doubt dressed in the trappings of a genre movie, albeit an artful one.
Director Anton Corbijn, the rock photographer whose feature debut was the stunning Joy Division film "Control," again shows remarkable restraint. With no distracting stylistic tics, he and cinematographer Martin Ruhe use naturalistic lighting (and the occasional meaningful void, composition-wise) to emphasize the uncertainty Jack faces in everyday surroundings.
We might have expected Corbijn, whose famous images of Depeche Mode and U2 stretched photography to the limits of self-caricature in pursuit of mood, to be an aggressive stylist behind the movie camera. But "The American" has none of the formal daring that Clooney's onetime partner Steven Soderbergh employed in his own nod toward the '70s loner crime allegory, "The Limey."
But in its way, this film is more daring than that one, whose hero's motivation - a father's need to avenge his murdered daughter - was easily understood to any viewer. "The American," it turns out, doesn't quite know what he's doing, or why, or whether there's any way to redeem his misspent life.
"The American"
Our grade: B+
Genre: Thriller
Running Time: 105 min
MPAA rating: R
Release Date: Sep 1, 2010
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