Director: Anton Corbijn
Starring: George Clooney, Thekla Reuten, Paolo BonaCelli, Violante Placido.
Score: 8/10
This review by Rob Nijman.
Anton Corbijn has long been famous as a portrait photographer and designer of album covers, video clips and documentaries, but in 2007 took a step further with the sort-of biopic ‘Control’. The book adaptation, about the life of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, had the Dutchman at the business end of much praise and good reviews. A particularly stylish cinematography, focusing heavily on a cast that gave excellent performances under Corbijn’s helming, allowed the director to scoop up a number of awards at Cannes as well. With his new and intriguing drama ‘The American’, he adapts this style to bring us a film that remains attractive and interesting throughout, even though most of the time very little actually happens and the plot laps very quietly.
The film tells the story about Jack (George Clooney), a mysterious refugee or runaway criminal particularly adept at furnishing and using weapons. Something that has caused him, sometime, somewhere, to get into trouble, leaving him running for shelter in the periphery of central Italy. Which is all you have to know, because we start following the protagonist – very understatedly yet intensely played by Clooney – now, and are experiencing what he experiences now. As you care less and less about that obscure and unknown beginning (which resulted in the ongoing complications) and become more interested in the end (or the final fate of the protagonist), you realize that this is the type of film that just begins halfway through and doesn’t make excuses to explain what you’ve missed – as in all developments, meetings and stories in everyday life, there is no clear beginning. As he is approached via his contact by a new customer (Thekla Reuten) who is in need of his services, becomes friends with an Italian priest (Paolo BonaCelli), and rolls haphazardly into a relationship with a local prostitute (Violante Placido), we follow his confluence of circumstances into a new and intriguing direction.
‘The American’ is a film that seems to place style over substance, and walks away with it very, very well. The story is not always smart, fascinating or – given the clear influence in genre and style – surprising, but that is expertly moved to the background by the special cinematography, and the striking eye of Corbijn. Close-ups of the actors, distance shots that are more about the environment than the cast, beautiful images of the Italian scenery (near L’Aquila, an area that shortly before suffered a natural disaster that saw Clooney cum suis handpick this location out of benevolence, as did De Niro with his TriBeCa festival for New York after the terrorist attacks of September 11) and striking visual discoveries shown to us by the director, who appears to tell us something in each focus or movement of his camera. Some scenes are more moving pictures and less video, and the viewer – soothed by an immersive soundtrack – is very slowly treated to the details onscreen. The expression in Clooney’s face. A butterfly fluttering by. The TV in the background, showing ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’ by Sergio Leone – a master and obvious source of inspiration when it comes to telling by showing. An empty room, and the mood conveyed by the only person within it. Or the craftsmanship of Anton Corbijn.
