‘The American’ is George Clooney as a hitman. At the start of the film, he is lying low in the wilds of Sweden after a job which may have gone wrong. But someone who doesn’t have his best interests at heart tracks him there and suddenly there’s a string of bodies lying in the snow, including a woman he had been living with.
“Don’t have friends” says his controller, the sinister Pavel, as he relocates him to a remote town—even village—in Italy.
The 2010 film was directed by Anton Corbijn, and it is an accomplished piece of work. Although it was marketed as an action thriller, it is more a study in character, for being a hitman who is trying to get out is a lonely and suspicious place to be.
Suspecting everyone
The Swedes who have tried to kill him once try again. Pavel asks him to acquire and assemble a gun for Mathilde, a client of his. Clara, a prostitute whom he falls for, has a gun in her handbag. He suspects everyone, in short, and with good reason.
Corbijn says he was influenced by the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, and there’s a visual nod to this in one of the restaurant scenes, where a Leone film is playing on a TV set in the corner. But in those films, we see the hitman at work, in their element. The American, in contrast, is about the domestic life of the hitman, and it’s not a good place to be.
Even without the sense that almost anyone might be the person who has the contract to kill you, the film captures well the isolation that is required, the tedium of it, the deceptions that you have to practice.
Secrets of his own
Clooney’s cover story in the village is that he is a visiting wildlife photographer, but the priest, who has secrets of his own, notices the calloused hands of a man who spends time assembling and disassembling metal. The craft and business of making a gun can never have been portrayed so lovingly on screen.
Clara, who is played captivatingly and erotically by the Italian actor and singer Violante Placido, asks Clooney what his secret is, and is relieved when he tells her that no, he’s not married.
The film also looks fabulous, from the opening scenes in Sweden to the alleys and stairways of the Italian hillside villages. It is a clever psychological portrait of a man who can never escape his present because of his past.
Here’s the trailer.
Around the edges 