Review of The American (2010) by Wxwax — 24 Nov 2010

There's an unintended irony in The American's title, an irony that sweetly describes this movie's charm.

When you think of an American movie these days, you think of a noisy spectacle, entertainment over character, explosions over story. But despite its title, The American is the antithesis of the big Hollywood spectacular. It's a quiet, contemplative film, lyrical in its grey, damp beauty and solemn in its business.

The American is to be enjoyed for how it tells a story, not for the story itself, because the tale is familiar. It's the one about an aging hitman. Need I say more? Yet Dutch director Anton Corbijn finds new touches for his old story. His setting is the Italian medieval town of Castel del Monte, in the Apennine mountains of Italy. It's a postcard setting, crowded tile rooftops hugging each other up a hillside, narrow twisting cobblestone roads zig-zagging up between the old buildings. The cinematography is beautiful. But the light is rarely the golden, the colors rarely those of the picture postcard. Instead it's mostly drizzly, dark, dank and slightly worn. The town's a character every bit as much as George Clooney, who plays the title role with a restraint that matches the weather and the lighting. He's a paid assassin and it's all become too much for this paranoid, deeply introverted loner. Clooney goes the distance without ever cracking a smile. It might have been a dangerously low-energy, one-note performance. But instead it plays as a man who earned a good living by staying under a rain cloud but who finally dares to hope that maybe he's entitled to a little sunshine as well. As I said, the story's a familiar one and the ending's morality is straight out of the Hays code from the 1930's. For my taste, the utterly conventional conclusion is perhaps the film's weakest point. But its strengths overcome that solitary weakness. It has a subdued style, an elegance and beauty not typically associated with movies about assassins. Nor, for that matter, with movies about Americans.