Review of The American (2010) by Shiira — 08 Sep 2010

It takes one to know one; spies in a quiet Italian village, spies who can only be up to no good, and loud. The American recognizes the lady in shades as being from his tribe, and converges toward their rendezvous point, a cafe, with the purchase he just made from the cheese vendor.

Jack carries with him a wedge of real cheese, not Cheese Whiz or Kraft singles, while his filmic limner, George Clooney, carries a real movie, a homage to, perhaps, the French New Wave, not cheesy action flicks or films in general from the post-MTV generation.

Coming off the heels of Jim Jarmusch's "The Limits of Control", the moviegoer half-expects Jack to exchange matchboxes with the shady lady, but no, "The American" has a reverence for movie lore; it's not out to deconstruct the spy movie, rather, the filmmaker wants to slow the damn thing down.

Mathilde(Thekla Reuten) simply gives Jack his next mission, his instructions, very old school, like something out of a Jean-Pierre Melville flick, or Fred Zinneman's "The Day of the Jackal", made so by the film's caterpillar-esque pacing and existential anti-hero.

Moviegoers who pooh-poohed "The Limits of Control", in all likelihood, didn't know what Jarmusch(the most European of all contemporary American filmmakers) was deconstructing. "The American" knows.

After all, wall-to-wall action doesn't ensue after Jack's briefing, instead the film goes into hibernation, a cocoon of deliberation and incremental suspense, before the chaos* begins, which is put forth into motion when Jack and Mathilde spot a rare butterfly during their "picnic".

At its most self-reflexive, this ironically-titled film(in reference to its form and content, and historical context) offers a veiled critique of contemporary major studio films, as the Catholic priest(Paolo Bonicelli) doubles as an in-frame predictor of audience receptivity(some of whom will be bored by its retro tropes), when he criticizes Jack for making a guidebook on Italian architecture, even though the American possesses no sense of history(read: today's moviegoers watch films in isolation from the breadth of bygone eras and movements).

Americans "live in the present" the priest offers, thus "The American" will seem tedious to them; the very same "tedium" which Jarmusch archly satirizes, this filmmaker celebrates as a narratorial elixir for the fast cars, fast women, and fast-vanishing ability of an audience to get lost in a story well-told.