The American (2010) Review
8/10
A man kills a woman in the snow in Sweden in the first four minutes, because she has seen where he lives, and then drives south to a village in Abruzzo to build a rifle for somebody he will never meet again.
The 8 is for a film with the confidence to be quiet for a hundred minutes. There are perhaps eleven minutes of action in it. The rest is a craftsman working with his hands, walking stone streets, and being watched by a priest who has correctly identified what he is.
The withheld points are for the romance, which asks the audience to accept a great deal on very little, and for an ending that reaches for irony where the rest of the film has been content with observation.
It Is About the Work
Jack builds a weapon. The film gives that process real screen time: sourcing a receiver, machining a suppressor from a length of tube, testing rounds in a quarry, adjusting a spring by hand.
None of that is montage. Corbijn shoots it as labor, in long takes, with the sound of metal on metal, and Clooney does the work convincingly enough that the audience believes the character has done it a thousand times.
That is the entire characterization strategy. Jack tells us nothing about himself. He has no backstory scene, no confession and no flashback. What we know about him is what we can observe: he is precise, he is patient, he checks doorways, and he is very good at a thing that has cost him everything.
The film’s title is the only editorial it offers. He is the American in a town full of people who have lived there for generations, and everyone can see it, and he cannot stop being it.
Martin Booth’s novel was called A Very Private Gentleman and the change of title moves the whole emphasis. A private gentleman is a man with a temperament. An American in Abruzzo is a man who is conspicuous everywhere he goes, which is a far better description of his actual problem.
Procedure is characterization. A reader learns more from watching somebody do their job carefully than from any amount of stated history.
The requirement is accuracy. Get one step wrong and a reader who knows the craft is gone, and readers who do not know it can still feel imprecision. Corbijn shot enough real process that the fiction is load-bearing.
The corollary is restraint about the past. Every backstory scene you cut forces the reader to build the character from present-tense evidence, and a character they built is one they trust.
The Marketing Was a Different Film
Focus Features opened it on Labor Day weekend 2010 with a campaign built around Clooney, a gun and a chase. It took the number one spot and then collapsed, and audiences awarded it one of the lowest exit grades the CinemaScore system records.
That gap is instructive instead of shameful. The film delivered exactly what it intended. The people in the seats had been sold a thriller with an internationally famous star and received a hundred minutes of a man filing metal in a mountain village.
You can defend the studio’s position. A slow, largely wordless European character study with no stars would have opened on eight screens. Attaching Clooney and selling it as a thriller got it onto three thousand, and a substantial number of people saw a film they would never otherwise have encountered.
What it cost is the audience’s trust, and that is a real price. A viewer who feels lied to does not simply dislike the film, they resent it, which is why the exit scores are so much worse than the reviews.
The numbers make the tension plain. Twenty million dollars in production against about sixty-eight million worldwide is a clear commercial success, and the exit polling suggests most of the people who produced it left unhappy. Both facts are true and only one of them shows up in a ledger.
Corbijn Shoots Like a Photographer
Corbijn spent decades as a photographer, largely of musicians, before he made films, and the composition here is the work of somebody who thinks in single frames.
Castel del Monte in Abruzzo does the heavy lifting. Stone alleys that narrow to shoulder width, staircases doubling back, doorways framing figures at the end of long approaches. The town is a defensive structure and the film uses it as one, because Jack reads every street as a problem of sightlines.
Martin Ruhe’s photography keeps him small in the frame and frequently seen from above or through an aperture. The audience is placed in the position of whoever is watching him, which the plot eventually confirms is a real person.
The film also references its own ancestry openly. Jack watches Once Upon a Time in the West on a bar television, and the villagers call him Mr Butterfly for the tattoo on his back. Corbijn is telling you which shelf this belongs on and then behaving with far more restraint than anything on it.
Location can carry surveillance without a single shot of a watcher. A town built to be defended supplies sightlines, chokepoints and blind corners for free, and the audience feels observed because the geometry says so.
Choose the setting for what it does to your character’s behavior. Jack in a modern city would be an anonymous man. Jack in a village of four hundred is a permanent event.
Framing a protagonist small and distant, repeatedly, produces unease with no plot justification required. Do it consistently and the reader will assume a watcher exists.
Clooney Removes the Charm
This is the least charming performance of his career and that is the point of casting him. The audience arrives with two decades of accumulated warmth and the film declines to spend any of it.
Jack barely speaks. He does not joke. He is impatient with people who slow him down and rude to the only two people who are kind to him. Clooney plays him with the face doing almost nothing, which makes the two moments of visible fear enormous.
It works because the charm exists in the audience’s memory even when it is absent from the screen. Casting an unknown here would produce a similar performance and a different film, because there would be nothing being withheld.
He also plays fitness as character. Jack does press-ups and pull-ups in a bare room, obsessively, and the body is the only thing he still controls. Clooney was forty-nine and the film photographs him as a man maintaining equipment that is starting to wear out.
Paolo Bonacelli’s priest is the only person who gets anything out of him. He identifies Jack as somebody carrying a great deal, tries repeatedly to open a conversation, and is met with deflection. Their scenes are the film’s warmest and its most hopeless.
The priest also has a secret of his own, which the film reveals quietly and then declines to use. It is there to establish that everyone in the village is carrying something, and that Jack is remarkable only in the scale of it. Most films would have made that a plot point. This one lets it be a fact about a man.
The Ending Reaches
The last act supplies a betrayal, a final job that is arranged to make Jack the target, and a drive out of town with a wound he is hiding.
The mechanics are fine and the irony is too neat. Jack has built a weapon that is used against him, which is the sort of symmetry a film this observational does not need. It converts a portrait into a fable in the final ten minutes.
The romance carries the same problem. Violante Placido is good and the relationship is asked to bear the weight of Jack’s entire hope for a different life on the strength of a few scenes.
Neither flaw sinks it. The film’s achievement is the hundred minutes before that, and a slightly conventional ending on an unconventional picture is a much smaller failure than the reverse.
An ending that supplies neat irony can undercut two hours of observation. Symmetry reads as authorial arrangement, and arrangement breaks the documentary spell a film like this has been building.
If your work has earned its effect through accumulation, end by accumulating one more thing. The final beat should be the same kind of material as everything before it.
Watch for the temptation specifically in quiet work. The pressure to justify the restraint with a strong finish is real, and giving in to it tells the audience you did not trust the restraint either.
Should you watch The American?
Yes, if you want the film that exists instead of the one that was advertised. This is a study of a competent man in a beautiful place doing careful work while waiting for something to arrive, and the eleven minutes of violence in it are incidental to why it is worth watching.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 4 of my film lists