What's so European about 'The American?'
George Clooney and Violante Placido in 'The American.' Photo by Giles Keyte.
7:56 am Sep. 2, 2010
One day, when movie fans talk about director Anton Corbijn as one of the greats, it's a scene in The American that they will point to as a defining moment. It's the scene in which George Clooney goes down on a prostitute.
After a decade of grisly, terroristic and slick international thrillers, many of them starring Clooney himself, it is an extraordinary moment of tenderness.
Clooney is pawing shyly at the woman like he's never seen one before. And it's as if we haven't, either. Violante Placido, as the Italian hooker, luxuriates in a soft violet-pink light, her breasts pointing up to heaven, her round face glowing. Clooney is overcome with adoration for this woman, easing his way south of the frame, to a place no John should go. Fade out, cut away or something, right? No, Corbijn holds on Placido's upper torso and ecstatic face. Alright, on to the next thing, yes? No, Corbijn lets the sex play out, through a bit of rough stuff, some awkward repositioning, and a few sweet, soft kisses. Only then does he cut to the cigarette.
A few of the people in the multiplex matinee audience I watched this film with shifted in their seats and giggled nervously. I could hear their thoughts: When do we get to the killing?
Corbijn and cinematographer Martin Ruhe linger upon the stunning women in this film (a lover, the prostitute, a female assassin) not lasciviously but through Clooney's stunned, lonesome, appreciative eyes. Critics are already pointing out that Corbjin's meditative style makes this thriller more European than "American" but they're correct only on the matter of style, not substance.
Clooney's hunger for these women, his desperation and paranoia about whether he can trust any of them in a viciously double-dealing world, is as American as it gets.
The poster for The American promises a standard George Clooney international thriller. The actor is running in a crisp suit with a gun in his hand, looking intently off frame. What a thrill, then, to find that the movie doesn't deliver on that unoriginal promise, any more than The Godfather is a shoot-em-up. Yes, The American is super-derivative in plot: a James Bond- Jason Bourne-type man of mystery tries to survive one last job in order to settle down with a woman he (thinks) he can trust. Yes, it mostly harps on two notes, paranoia and loneliness. But a great filmmaker can do a lot with two notes. Corbjin, who is Dutch, plays them as a very simple dirge for the American Dream (and Empire), with the Italian Alps as picturesque graveyard.
Critics have already started dissing Clooney's ability to bring to life his character's dark, brooding soul (as depicted in the movie's source material, the Martin Booth novel A Very Private Gentleman). Despite having brooded fairly convincingly through flicks like Syriana and Michael Clayton, he's still thought of as an heir to screwball-comedy Cary Grant, not Hitchcock-thriller Cary Grant. But his vulnerability and despair come through as much more than pantomime here. Corbijn got quite a lot of the real thing out of him this time around.
It's bound to exasperate anyone who, based on the poster and trailers, was betting on Bourne hyperkinetic action or complex, off-the-headlines political intrigues. One local critic yawned, "It’s clear what Corbijn is trying to do. Here is Jack, an assassin worn thin by his trade. All he wants is a life where he can make love to a leggy brunette without fearing she’ll shoot him. You understand his weariness, but you don’t quite believe it, what with Clooney’s perma-grin." It's hard to believe this particular critic was paying attention, as the few moments when Clooney actually does grin are carefully deployed and memorable.
Conversely, the New York Times' A.O. Scott seems to be confusing the spare visual style for Clooney's performance: "Mr. Clooney, shorn of his mischief and charm, does not possess the resources to suggest the state of existential torment that are crucial to the logic of his character. Instead he looks bored, tired, intermittently anxious and sometimes almost excited. At least he seems to appreciate the beauty of the scenery, human and otherwise. It’s hard not to when so little else is going on."
There's so much going on, I wonder if Scott was just too busy remembering the fun of O Brother Where Art Thou? to notice.
"Existential torment" is a gratuitously fancy way of describing Clooney's struggle. As educated in such art-speak as designer-photographer-music video director Corbijn probably is, The American better accommodates tiny words like Love, Fear, Death and Guilt. The catalogue of film references (including a crackling picture-in-picture homage to Sergio Leone), studied compositions and tired tropes (i.e. the priest who wants to be Clooney's father confessor) should have done this movie in, but Corbijn pulls these elements together with the force of Martin Scorsese focusing Taxi Driver upon the same crystallizing, universally comprehensible dilemma: an American boy's spiral into loneliness.
The American takes us back to the 1970's, when a genre film this patient, taciturn and reluctant to pull the trigger wouldn't be instantly categorized as "European." More of this, please.
