The American (2010) Review
8/10
A man kills a woman in the snow in Sweden in the first four minutes, because she’s seen where he lives, and then drives south to a village in Abruzzo to build a rifle for somebody he’ll 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 and walking stone streets, watched by a priest who has correctly identified what he is.
Quiet films usually test my patience, and this one doesn’t. I could watch Clooney file metal in a stone room for another hour. What pulls me in is the trust Corbijn places in the audience, letting a man’s hands tell us everything his mouth won’t.
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’s the entire characterization strategy, and I think it’s the smartest choice in the film. 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’s precise, he’s patient, he checks doorways, and he’s very good at a thing that’s cost him everything.
The film’s title is the only editorial it offers. He’s the American in a town full of people who have lived there for generations, and everyone can see it, and he can’t 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’s conspicuous everywhere he goes. That’s 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 don’t know it can still feel imprecision. Corbijn shot enough real process that the fiction holds up.
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 serious number of people saw a film they’d never otherwise have encountered. What it cost is the audience’s trust, and that’s a real price. A viewer who feels lied to resents the film. That’s 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. I’d happily hang half the shots in this film on a wall.
Castel del Monte in Abruzzo is the film’s strongest asset. 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’s 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 doesn’t joke. He’s 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. That makes the two moments of visible fear enormous. This is my favorite Clooney performance, and it’s because he gives up the thing everybody pays to see. Those two flashes of fear hit me harder than any shootout in the film. It works because the charm exists in the audience’s memory even when it’s 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’s 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 in passing and then declines to use.
It’s there to establish that everyone in the village is carrying something, and that Jack stands out 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’s arranged to make Jack the target, and a drive out of town with a wound he’s hiding.
The mechanics are fine and the irony is too neat. Jack has built a weapon that’s used against him. That’s the sort of symmetry a film this observational doesn’t need. It converts a portrait into a fable in the final ten minutes.
That neat ending loses me a little. I don’t need the rifle turned back on its maker. I’d have ended on that drive out of town, with Jack alone and hurt and nothing symmetrical about it.
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 built 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 in quiet work. The pressure to justify the restraint with a strong finish is real, and giving in to it tells the audience you didn’t trust the restraint either.
Should you watch The American?
Yes, if you want the film that exists instead of the one that was advertised. It’s an 8 because I can’t think of a thriller this confident about keeping still, with Clooney stripping his own charm out of every frame and Corbijn shooting a village like a trap. It stops short of a 9 because of a romance built on too little and a last act that ties a bow on something that didn’t need one. The eleven minutes of violence are incidental to why I’d recommend it.
