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The man who refers to himself as Jack (George Clooney), a solemn, reserved figure at the center of Anton Corbijn's excellent new film The American, makes his living customizing rifles, and it's fair to surmise that he often uses them to murder people as well. But when people ask him what his work is, as a congenial Italian priest (Paolo Bonacelli) does, Jack says he is a photographer, capturing landscape images for vacation magazines. Covertness is his very nature: He mutters that he is "no good with machines," despite the fact that the repairing, maintaining, and altering of mechanisms makes up a great deal of what we see this quiet man do in Corbijn's equally covert film.
Like many movie assassins, Jack is on what appears to be his last assignment in Castel de Monte, a small town in northern Italy with streets that ascend and descend as if M.C. Escher had been the town architect. Jack's charge has to do with custom-fitting a rifle to fire like an automatic with good range for a colleague who calls herself Mathilde (Thekla Reuten).They talk shop, take the rifle on a test run, fill bullets with mercury at the tip, and speak almost nothing of themselves, save for Mathilde's assertion that Jack doesn't have a woman in his life. But he does have a woman of sorts: An uncommonly gorgeous prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido) who knows Jack as Eduardo in her red-lit bed.
A requisite counter-hitman shows up to tango with Jack and we get the expected "unfinished business" between Jack and his employer (Johan Leysen), but Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffe's narrative is suspiciously lean on drama. In fact, it becomes perfectly clear early on in this enigmatic genre piece that Jack functions as both protagonist and proxy for Corbijn. Referred to as the American by the friendly priest, Clooney (who has never been better) actually serves as three separate entities for the director -- a craftsman, a romantic hero, and that ideal face of America and its cinema -- and yet the film remains at an even octave throughout. The director's aesthetic obsession with processes, mirrored in the dialogue, suggests that Jack (the craftsman) could be discussing camera lenses as easily as the model type for a silencer; his assertion that his interest in a CGI butterfly "serves a purpose" is even more curious.
The filmmaker's debut, Control, concerning the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, was a simple, well-acted biopic given depth by Corbijn and cinematographer Martin Ruhe's peerless black-and-white compositions. The American, by contrast, is more personal, complexly drawn, and written with more eye than ear. The director and Joffe offer varying narratives inside the actual narrative, suggesting other stories Jack might want to work on or actually partake in; the film opens on the tail end of his last story in snow-swept Sweden.
To paraphrase Jack, Corbijn's focus here is on the sculpting of the image rather than history, but that doesn't mean that the American forgets his own past. Haunted by a shooting in Sweden, he is a man of great sins who clings to his guns and the strict codes he has set for himself, codes that cause disaster when fractured. The priest is another sinner and, walking through a courtyard with the American, they discuss an inability to fathom the events that lead to great sin and the subsequent ripples caused by such actions. It is Eduardo who ultimately must pay for these moral infractions, him being the romantic ideal. But, judging by the final shot of that CGI butterfly flapping heavenward, it would seem that Jack continues to wander.
Like many movie assassins, Jack is on what appears to be his last assignment in Castel de Monte, a small town in northern Italy with streets that ascend and descend as if M.C. Escher had been the town architect. Jack's charge has to do with custom-fitting a rifle to fire like an automatic with good range for a colleague who calls herself Mathilde (Thekla Reuten).They talk shop, take the rifle on a test run, fill bullets with mercury at the tip, and speak almost nothing of themselves, save for Mathilde's assertion that Jack doesn't have a woman in his life. But he does have a woman of sorts: An uncommonly gorgeous prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido) who knows Jack as Eduardo in her red-lit bed.
A requisite counter-hitman shows up to tango with Jack and we get the expected "unfinished business" between Jack and his employer (Johan Leysen), but Corbijn and screenwriter Rowan Joffe's narrative is suspiciously lean on drama. In fact, it becomes perfectly clear early on in this enigmatic genre piece that Jack functions as both protagonist and proxy for Corbijn. Referred to as the American by the friendly priest, Clooney (who has never been better) actually serves as three separate entities for the director -- a craftsman, a romantic hero, and that ideal face of America and its cinema -- and yet the film remains at an even octave throughout. The director's aesthetic obsession with processes, mirrored in the dialogue, suggests that Jack (the craftsman) could be discussing camera lenses as easily as the model type for a silencer; his assertion that his interest in a CGI butterfly "serves a purpose" is even more curious.
The filmmaker's debut, Control, concerning the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, was a simple, well-acted biopic given depth by Corbijn and cinematographer Martin Ruhe's peerless black-and-white compositions. The American, by contrast, is more personal, complexly drawn, and written with more eye than ear. The director and Joffe offer varying narratives inside the actual narrative, suggesting other stories Jack might want to work on or actually partake in; the film opens on the tail end of his last story in snow-swept Sweden.
To paraphrase Jack, Corbijn's focus here is on the sculpting of the image rather than history, but that doesn't mean that the American forgets his own past. Haunted by a shooting in Sweden, he is a man of great sins who clings to his guns and the strict codes he has set for himself, codes that cause disaster when fractured. The priest is another sinner and, walking through a courtyard with the American, they discuss an inability to fathom the events that lead to great sin and the subsequent ripples caused by such actions. It is Eduardo who ultimately must pay for these moral infractions, him being the romantic ideal. But, judging by the final shot of that CGI butterfly flapping heavenward, it would seem that Jack continues to wander.
