Director: Anton Corbijn

Cast: George Clooney, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, and Violante Placido

Rated: R

Runtime: 103 min.

 

 

Within the first moments of The American, it becomes apparent that its director, Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, has versed himself in the cinema of French great Jean-Pierre Melville. The master of cool gangsters and narrative minimalism, Melville reformatted trenchcoat-laden criminals from Hollywood like those played by James Cagney and Paul Muni, giving them a poetic resonance and seriousness that helped define the artistic peak of European cinema of the 1960s. Attempting the same spare, methodically paced approach as Melville, Corbijn makes a fatal error by mistaking style for substance.

George Clooney plays Jack, a secreted man whose history, it seems, involves being a gun-for-hire. In the first scenes, his wintry getaway is interrupted by some Swedish assassins out to settle a score for who-knows-what. The film never explains why Swedish men are after him; it’s enough to know that his complicated past is catching up with him. When he arrives in Rome to shake his tail, he reports to his employer, Pavel (Johan Leysen), who tells him to lay low in a small Italian village. Of course, Pavel has a job for Jack to complete in the meantime. You see, Jack also specializes in constructing made-to-order weaponry from scratch for assassins, and Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) is such an assassin.

In the village, Jack meets a local priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), who pesters him with questions of faith to which Jack has only cynical answers. But unlike the great character played by Alain Delon in Melville’s Le Samouraї—a comparable character study to be sure—Jack has no personal code that’s communicated within the film, therefore he has no real responses to the priest’s questioning. And if Jack does have a code, he must be breaking it by returning to Benedetto for company. He also visits a local whorehouse to meet Clara (Violante Placido), who instantly falls in love with Jack, despite his opaque disposition. Jack sees Clara as a possible companion with whom he can escape his solitary lifestyle. But no film forcing its fatalistic undercurrents as heavily as this one would dare allow for such a happy ending.

 

 

Continued HERE

 

POLL: Vote for your most anticipated September release...

Previous Homepage Bulletins

Sign up for a User Account
Register your profile to rate movies and keep track of your rankings.

Join Deep Focus Review's global group on Facebook