Anton Corbijn (2010)
‘You’re acting strangely’, says the prostitute Clara to Jack, the eponymous American, as he gets up from their bed and dresses, ‘as if you were thinking about something …’ Clara describes George Clooney’s performance as Jack very well. There must be a clause in Clooney’s contract with the cinema audiences of the world which entitles him, every so often, to play someone who never smiles. Watching him on occasions like this is both frustrating and like an extended version of the yes/no interlude on Take Your Pick: will Clooney lose concentration and allow his face to crack? Occasionally, during the first hour of The American, a smile seems to threaten but he keeps it in. When Clooney plays superficially superficial men (as in Up in the Air), he’s brilliant: he’s peerless in empathising with a shallow charmer and revealing him to be more complex than you expected. When he plays someone serious on the surface (in Michael Clayton and here) he’s inexpressive without suggesting hidden depths. Jack is a professional arms maker and international assassin, hiding out, for most of the film, in a small town called Castelvecchio in the mountains of Abruzzo. Jack’s coming to the end of his career and apparently regrets every moment of it. (One of the few affecting elements of Clooney’s portrait is the fact that, although he’s still in excellent shape in his fiftieth year, he’s nevertheless showing his age.) But to reinforce the poker face, he’s removed every bit of warmth from his voice to speak Jack’s lines – he sounds abrupt and toneless. Clara is spot on: Clooney acts as if he’s thinking about something – he appears to have a lot on his mind but you never discover what. Clara, needless to say, is no ordinary prostitute and Jack finds himself developing feelings for her. They go out to dinner at a local restaurant and, with a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo in his hand, he grins. The difference it makes to Clooney’s expressivity is startling (an actor and director as acute as he is must be aware of this): once he’s flashed the smile he’s able to register Jack’s spiritual bankruptcy in a way he couldn’t before. Then the shutters come down again.
The American has a screenplay by Rowan Joffe, adapted from a novel of 1990, A Very Private Gentleman, by the British writer Martin Booth (who died in 2004). The main character in the book was British too and you naturally wonder about the significance of his being made American in the film. Is Jack’s nationality symbolic? Is an American of today someone who’s practised in a role he no longer believes in? The explanation is probably simply that Clooney got involved in the project but the film’s title is shallowly thought-provoking, like the butterfly that Jack (‘Signor Farfalla’ as Clara calls him) has tattooed between his shoulder blades. Nick James’ piece on The American in this month’s Sight and Sound illustrates how much pleasure film lovers like him (unlike me) can get purely from spotting references to other movies. Anton Corbijn too seems pretty comfortable with this kind of approach. The American looks expensive, moves slowly, is proficiently made and up itself. Its subject seems to be making a film of the kind that it is. You’re struck that things have never been quite the same for this genre since the Cold War ended (when Jack phones an associate and reports what ‘the Swedes’ are doing the effect is comically bathetic). Even I could see The American was meant to evoke the heyday of this kind of story: the sequences of Jack making weapons recall The Day of the Jackal – and the climax to the action, which takes place during a religious procession, echoes the Liberation Day episode in Jackal. (The interaction between what’s happening in the foreground and background is feeble here compared with the Zinnemann film – let alone with what Coppola makes happen during the saint’s day procession in Godfather II, which Corbijn also brings to mind.) Other reminders of the way they used to make secret agent stories are the quantities of naked female flesh on show (mainly Violante Placido as Clara, also Irina Bjorklund in her brief appearance as another of Jack’s girlfriends). In case we thought Jack and Clara were going to live happily ever after, the ending is a kind of twist on On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (one of the few Bond films I’ve enjoyed). And there are resonances with protagonists in more recent movies played by Clooney’s friend Matt Damon – Jason Bourne of course and Tom Ripley. ‘Tu Vuo Fa’ L’Americano’, performed by Jude Law to the Damon character’s delight in The Talented Mr Ripley, is heard on a radio here. (Damon is probably better equipped to incarnate an elusive or anonymous figure: Clooney isn’t naturally well cast as someone you don’t notice.) With Thekla Reuten as a hit woman, Paolo Bonacelli as a dodgy priest (the faux-Catholic exchanges between him and Jack may be the worst bits of writing in The American because they’re the only purplish ones) and Filippo Timi, magnetic in the minor role of the priest’s illegimitate son. The skilful pastiche score is by Herbert Gronemeyer and the elegant photography by Martin Ruhe.
5 December 2010
