The American

The American is a thriller with a different look and feel to it. Not flashy or particularly violent--not even very busy, plotwise--it's more interested in character than story, more focused on interaction than action on the screen. The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, relying on thoughtful development of incident and personality, and careful attention to detail, rather than fast pace and fireworks. Most thrillers use the latter to distract their audiences from the implausibilities of their twists and turns. The American is smarter than that, and more respectful of the viewer, and that's a nice surprise in a movie belonging to this overworked genre. As well as a sly irony in one named after a nation historically synonymous with showiness and speed.

The story is simplicity itself. "Jack," a professional assassin (George Clooney), hides out in a small Italian village after an assignment in Sweden ends badly and he becomes a target of killers out for revenge. His only ally is his superior (Johan Leysen), a mysterious figure on the other end of some rather testy phone calls, who arranges a place for him to stay and funds for him to live on until he can safely emerge from hiding. Posing as a photographer, Jack befriends a local priest with an understandable curiousity about the stranger in his village, and pays regular visits to a high-priced brothel in a neighboring town, where he becomes infatuated with a beautiful hooker named Clara (Violante Placido). In order to keep Jack busy while in exile, his superior puts him to work on a rifle for another of his agents, Ingrid (Irina Bjorklund), who needs a weapon with precise specifications for an upcoming job. In between assignations with Clara, who gradually begins to return his affection, and philosophical talks with Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), Jack meets periodically with Ingrid. Their reltionship remains coolly professional, but her refusal to discuss her assignment arouses his curiousity. And then one night he's followed home by a shadowy figure whom he suspects of being one of the Swedes on his trail. His haven no longer safe, Jack realizes he must act decisively to preserve not only his own life but the lives of those he's come to care for.

What's remarkable about The American is its calculated unremarkability. It's not a film of big moments or gestures but of details and shadings, where a precisely placed look or movement of the hand can communicate more than ten minutes of dialogue in another movie. Much time is spent on watching Clooney simply go about his daily business. He rises early, does difficult-looking pushups, walks through the empty streets of the town, sits in a cafe moodily staring out the window with a glass of wine beside him. There's an existential sparseness to all of this--a film stripped down to its bare essentials, its lines clean and simple, its parts fitted together with the precision of a rifle. In fact, director Anton Corbijn's understated presentation of events effectively mimics Jack's cool, efficient approach to his own work, revealing the seriousness of purpose of one professional in the subtle artistry of another.

What's more, the story's lack of trimmings allows the film to go beneath the surface of events and unpretentiously examine some basic questions of human existence. Clooney's talks with the aged priest touch on matters of guilt and sin, and his relationship with Clara introduces the age-old theme of redemption through love. Jack also reveals his more contemplative side through an interest in butterflies, particularly a rare one that he discovers in the Italian countryside and later reveals to Clara. The butterfly, a recurring motif, grows richer in meaning with each appearance, metamorphosing from elegant image into the film's most important symbol.

Underlying everything is the movie's tragic awareness of the fallible nature of human kind and the inescapable aloneness of every individual. We struggle for connection, for ways to be available to others, to reveal ourselves and allow our vulnerabilities to show. But in Jack's world, vulnerability is the equivalent of death, swift and unforgiving. He not only hides away, he keeps his inner self hidden, locked up tight, along with his true name. It's not a coincidence that the two times he winds up in the sights of a killer's gun, he's with a woman he cares about. He's at his most exposed at those moments, and that puts him in danger of paying the ultimate price for vulnerability in his world.

True to its name, The American rarely strays from its protagonist's side: nearly every scene is from his point-of-view. As Jack grows less trusting of those around him, the film employs silence to convey his increasing sense of unease, and invests even the prettiest shots of the village square and the surrounding countryside with the feeling of imminent danger. What the movie shows is always heavy with the presence of what it doesn't show. Darkened streets and secluded spots in the woods express the usual kind of threat, but busy sidewalks and brightly lit restaurants add to the paranoid atmosphere in less conventional ways. The sparing use of violence artfully enhances this mood. What The American lacks in action, it makes up in tension--the film operates like a coiled spring. You watch it tighten little by little, waiting for it to snap. And when it finally does, it's quick and explosive, over almost before you know it, and shocking despite the fact that you were expecting it to happen.

The star power of George Clooney made this film bigger than it would have been otherwise. Without his presence, The American would have flown under the radar, but he made it a player at the box office. Unlike his character, who is out of place in the tiny community sheltering him, Clooney is perfectly at home in a picture of this modest size and means. The role of Jack is perfectly tailored to his intensity and smoldering good looks. It's essentially a silent part--Clooney does very little talking and rarely even smiles. Though known for his easy charm and gift with dialogue, he surprises by relying mostly on facial expression and posture to convey his character's burden of guilt and wariness of all around him. Grim-faced and brooding, this unusually introspective American gazes reluctantly inward, examining his violent identity with unwanted insight. Jack veils his eyes as a matter of professional caution, but he can't hide their haunted quality--when nothing is happening on the screen, that's when something is happening most profoundly in him. The drama is in Jack's face, a mask of disillusionment with himself and bitter mourning for the corrupt world he cannot leave, or change.

The other actors lend the star strong support. Bonacelli exudes a touching melancholy as the priest--a would-be confessor to Jack, his overtures to the quiet American make little headway and he ends instead by confessing the sins of his own past. Only Clara succeeds in penetrating the protective wall Jack has built around himself. Placido invests what could easily be dismissed as a cliched role--the beautiful prostitute with a heart of gold--with sensitivity and a sensuality that goes beyond conventional movie sexiness. Moreover, she and Clooney have good screen chemistry, enough to make both the charged sexuality and the growing affection between their two characters convincing, and at the film's conclusion, genuinely moving.

One of Corbijn's most impressive achievements with this somber, reticent film is the way it dusts off a number of other movie cliches--the sensitive, lonely gunman (familiar mostly from westerns like Gregory Peck's memorable The Gunfighter), the doomed romance between two social misfits, the irony of fate--and applies its simple, unadorned style to make them look, if not wholly fresh, at least more interesting than they would with fancier, more expensive treatment. The American uses these familiar tropes without apology or hint of irony, but introspectively, in a way that matches Jack's own melancholy musings. The result is a quiet, sober study of human imperfection, guilt, and the elusive nature of redemption, which evades one's uncertain grasp as easily as a butterfly.