Killshot: A Review of 'The American'

There’s a great deal of pleasure to be taken in craftsmanship alone, especially when it is both precise and concise. In The American, George Clooney plays the titular countryman Jack (not his real name), hiding out in a sleepy Italian village, who applies his considerable technique to constructing a weapon for an assassination. His own quiet commitment is echoed by director Anton Corbijn, who treats the film as though he were planning an understated death-act of his own.

Meticulous but involving, The American finds a way to work firmly within genre boundaries without being ‘generic’. It’s one of those films “they don’t make anymore”, but the ideological implications of it suggest there may be more on the way. Jack works with his hands on tactile material to produce a one-of-a-kind tool that rates as a work of art; he is also besieged by suspicions and shady characters. America, once coloniser of the European unconscious (a phrase I borrow from German filmmaker Wim Wenders, whose work is also echoed here), is now relegated to isolationist artist whose labour will be abused by those controlling him: it is the world of earlier Clooney film The Good German inverted for the twenty-first century. In a time of collapsing money markets, only physical objects can be invested with meaning, but even these can be put to unintended uses.

With its invocations of a gothic hell-on-earth for the emotionally tormented it is also reminiscent of In Bruges, but without the jokes (the presence of Thekla Reuten, the love interest from Martin McDonagh’s comedy, only aids the feelings of familiarity). It is also any movie about hit men who themselves become targets. But despite this, the film avoids a mythic quality, even as it toys with pseudo-poetic images of butterflies and intertextual references to Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in the West plays in the background, although a closer narrative model would have to be High Noon).

Promisingly, Clooney’s is the only name most people will recognise from the opening credits, and this sense of his alienation amongst a population he does not understand (the language barrier is symptomatic of a more existential gulf between Jack and everyone else) adds to a sense of claustrophobia which is potent despite all the sweeping scenery. Corbijn even finds a few ways of filming his star in an original way, which for a face as overexposed as Clooney’s (did someone say Nespresso?) is quite an achievement. He also has an eye for the details: shoes being removed before a foot chase, a restaurant bill paid even in the midst of incredible tension.

Rich in allegorical potential, if not potent allegory, The American is a film to slowly relish rather than greedily consume. Closer to the work of Graham Greene than a modern airport novel, it is satisfying and sly, and feels a lot more contemporary than any fiction that might offer America as the centre of gravity and Europe as anything other than a treacherous hinterland of precarious stability.