THE AMERICAN
Directed by Anton Corbijn
Produced by Anne Carey, Jill Green, Ann Wingate, Grant Heslov and George Clooney
Written by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth
Released by Focus Features
USA. 105 min. Rated R
With George Clooney, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, Violante Placido & Johan Leysen
 

Midway through the throwback thriller The American, George Clooney’s tight-lipped assassin is browsing through a garage to find spare parts for a made-to-order sniper rifle when he’s asked if he’s a mechanic. “It’s a hobby,” he says. I don’t know if professional killers were ever called “mechanics,” but they sure were in the 1972 Charles Bronson vehicle The Mechanic. And I like to think Clooney’s acknowledging that, just one of the odes to the empty lives of lonely hit men from which this quietly enjoyable movie obviously takes its cues.

After some business in Sweden goes bad, laconic killer Jack (Clooney) flees to a medieval Italian village to lie low. The village, Castel del Monte, is honeycombed with stone alleyways, and shuffling back to his rented room at night after drinking coffee alone, an increasingly jittery and world-weary Jack expects to get ambushed by the evil Swedes. But his handlers want him to stay put so he can finish a new job: designing a high-powered rifle for another assassin. He doesn’t trust them, or anybody else, but he’s the kind of guy with nothing else but his professionalism and his craft.

While we initially think of Jack as cold-blooded—in the opening scene, he kills a lady friend when she becomes an accidental witness—he’s really a big softie. Though he’s got orders to keep to himself, he can’t help getting drawn into the life, and bed, of a gorgeous prostitute played by Violante Placido. (I have a feeling that even in an Italian backwater the stunning Placido would somehow rise above that profession).

The movie’s based on the Martin Booth novel A Very Private Gentleman, often praised for its “authenticity.” I haven’t read it. But I can say authenticity is not the word I would use to describe the film adaptation. Like the 1970s movies it draws inspiration from, The American exists in a fantasy world where elegant and mostly white European assassins play cat-and-mouse games in picturesque foreign locales, and where nobody ever calls the cops. (Clooney’s buyer and rival super-assassin is a cool beauty (Thekla Reuten), who favors designer clothes that show off her superb figure.) Documentary realism, this is not. But like its predecessors, the movie’s pleasurable in the way it patiently lays out scenes that reveal character with little dialogue and no exposition. What it has most in common with the great ’70s genre flicks—The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The French Connection—is that it feels like it was made for adults. It expects you to pay attention and to enjoy its attention to detail.

Although picturesque, it’s seldom prettified, and director Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer, lets the town’s dinginess sometimes show through, never letting it lapse into a mere travelogue, an Eat Pray Love with mercury-tipped bullets (although the filmmakers supposedly did choose the location to drum up local tourism). The little dialogue is a blessing, for what there is doesn’t always work. A sensual, wise priest who befriends Clooney speaks strictly in movie cornballisms: “You have a craftsman’s hands, not an artist’s” or “You Americans want to escape from history.” And the plot’s twists, and holes, are obvious enough. Thankfully, though, some things have improved since the 1970s. A car chase that in an earlier era would have eaten up 15 minutes of screen time is short, sweet, and lethal. Brendon Nafziger
September 1, 2010