Gene Kelly was an American in Paris, but George Clooney is an American in Italy – and also Sweden, which is where we first meet him, shacked out in the snowy, silent woods (the film opens in total silence) to the subsequent strains of soft piano music, in the company of a gorgeous Swedish minx. Alas, the good times don’t last. There are footsteps in the snow outside their cabin, then the sound of bullets whistling past. George takes out his gun. “You have a GUN?” squeals Miss Sweden, her romantic dreams of a weekend with George Clooney in tatters; “Why would you have a gun?”. What happens next is shocking, and something you’d never have expected from the suave, silver-haired heartthrob – though at least he has the decency to have nightmares about it later, when he’s in Italy and reluctantly romancing another gorgeous woman.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. George is a hitman in hiding, though also a master gunsmith, and indeed his assignment while laying low in a small Italian village (Castel del Monte in Abruzzo, east of Rome) is to craft a gun for a female colleague. I guess it doesn’t really make sense to advertise your presence in this way if you’re trying to hide out – he’d actually be safer taking a job as a hitman; at least that way he could move around – but it doesn’t really matter. The American is a mood-piece where atmosphere and character are way more important than plot.
Atmosphere, as choreographed by director Anton Corbijn, is becalmed, beautiful and deliberately chilly. Character – as played by Clooney – is much the same. The hitman’s determined not to make friends (trying to avoid a repeat of what happened in Sweden), but does inexplicably bond with an elderly priest and, less inexplicably, a beautiful prostitute (Violante Placido). Mostly, however, he broods, crafts his gun and waits for things to happen while Corbijn’s camera reveals the village – a tumble of houses on a hillside – in its many moods: wreathed in clouds, enveloped in magic-hour blue, waking up to a smoky dawn.
Corbijn previously made Control, which might also be a good title for this film. The style is controlled, and control is also all-important to our hero: his contact (played by Johan Leysen) supplies him with a mobile phone, but George throws away the mobile and calls Johan from a pay-phone whenever it suits him, afraid to relinquish control. He’s almost pathologically introverted (the film is adapted from a book called A Very Private Gentleman), and sometimes there’s even a suggestion that everything around him may be just an extension of his inner world, like a hall of mirrors. He himself is The American, “l’Americano” – and the song playing in the village café is ‘Tu vuo fa l’Americano’, just as his coffee is a ‘caffe Americano’ (espresso diluted with hot water). There’s an interesting movie to be made from that suggestion, a study in psychosis: a man who no longer sees things as they really are, but only in relation to his own narrow psyche.
But we digress – because The American isn’t that movie. Instead, the point is that George’s chilly life has made him a bit misanthropic. You know what Hell is, says the priest, “you live in it: it is a place without Love” (this priest is full of portentous maxims, also telling George that “you are American; you think you can escape History”). The question is whether he’ll open his heart, get out of the paid-assassin business and go off with the prostitute, or whether he’ll kill her instead. Trouble is, we don’t really think he’s going to kill her – not just because Miss Placido is smokin’ hot but because there’s a weightless quality to the film, and the character (it’s appropriate that everyone calls him “Mr. Butterfly”). Corbijn’s emphasis on remote, fragile atmosphere ends up neutering the hitman; you feel he wouldn’t have the bad manners to break the mood by doing something awful.
The American ends weakly, with clichéd situations: George says he’s “out”, Johan makes a menacing phone call then comes to the village himself (why?) for a final shoot-out. The wise priest is also quite a shopworn figure, ditto the local girl – Violante’s friend – who’s learning English and longs to go to America (the film seems to be set in the Italy of 20 or 30 years ago). All that fades away, however, in the face of elegance – the elegance of the opening credits (our hero silhouetted in the lights of a tunnel), the elegance of the visuals and poised, languid ambience, the elegance of George Clooney himself. He’s brusque when he goes to the brothel, even as he’s falling in love with Violante: “I came here to get pleasure, not to give it,” he snaps – but of course he’s mistaken. The American gives pleasure, and so does The American.
