Published: 06:00 AM, Wed Sep 01, 2010
'The American' has a distinctly European air
By John Horn
Los Angeles Times
The first sequence of "The American," like much of the rest of the movie, contains scarcely any dialogue. The scene unfolds in the snowy emptiness of Sweden, where Jack (George Clooney) is hiking with Ingrid (Irina Bjorklund), a woman whose history with Jack isn't revealed.
A sniper's bullet tears through the frozen air, and in mere minutes the audience must puzzle out any number of critical questions. Who is Jack (whose real name might be Edward)? Why is someone trying to kill him? Why does he react as he does, particularly how he leaves his girlfriend?
Most movies from the big U.S. studios would doubtlessly provide responses in short order, but "The American" is content to leave many things - including a clearer explanation of what unfolds in the film's opening frames - left unsaid and unanswered. Very loosely adapted from British author Martin Booth's obscure 1991 novel, "A Very Private Gentleman," director Anton Corbijn's film, opening today, is a cinematic anomaly: a U.S. production that in look, pacing and casting is more European than Clooney's own Italian villa.
"I'm sure a lot of people will think it's on the slow side of things," says Corbijn. "But I think there is too much explaining in films sometimes. Yes, there's not a lot of back story on George's character. But it's enough for me to follow the metamorphosis that he is trying to achieve."
As in the book, Jack is an accomplished and precise craftsman, but what he is meticulously creating in the workshop isn't a handmade violin or a ship in a bottle: They're high-powered weapons used for assassinations. Jack wastes little energy worrying about the principles of his calling. It's his job, he's good at it and he takes as much pride in his handiwork as a gourmet chef might show for a faultless beef Wellington. And in Booth's novel, he actually believes he's providing something of a public service, a critical cog in the gears of history.
Like almost anyone with an illicit past, Jack must constantly watch the shadows, and as Corbijn's film begins, Jack is looking to get out - with one last automatic rifle to build for a female shooter named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). He heads to a medieval Italian town in Abruzzo to escape his pursuers and build his final gun, and while there he meets Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and the prostitute Clara (Violante Placido), who independently conspire to reveal a bit of Jack's hidden soul.
"The American" is very much a tale of a man alone, and to highlight that vision the filmmakers not only switched its protagonist's nationality (he's English in the novel) but also surrounded Clooney with a cast and crew almost exclusively European. At a very late stage, Corbijn even recast the part of Jack's boss, replacing U.S. actor Bruce Altman with the Belgian performer Johan Leysen.
Rather than pack pages of expositional dialogue into the script, Corbijn, who is best known as a photographer, relied on long, lingering shots of Jack and the Italian countryside. "We were trying to make," the director says, "a film that had a lot of beauty in it."
That tricky juxtaposition - beauty and ugliness, life and death, heaven and hell - presented any number of obstacles in getting "The American" made.
Reflecting the suggestion of transformation, Clooney's character sports a large tattoo of a butterfly between his shoulders (in the novel, the character paints the insects as a cover for his real profession, but in the film he pretends to be a photographer). And to show that Jack wasn't the only person wrestling with his past, the filmmakers gave the priest an out-of-wedlock son.
But could Jack really be reborn? Would the movie mirror the book's mixed but ultimately upbeat ending? Could Jack and Clara drive off into the Italian sunset? Those queries sparked any number of rewrites and debates, changes that ultimately overlapped with Clooney's casting.
Clooney, who subsequently will be seen in writer-director Alexander Payne's "The Descendants" in 2011, ultimately weighed in on how he thought the movie should end. Without giving anything away, he made an unusual choice.
"This wasn't one where we said, 'We're doing an "Ocean's Eleven" franchise,' " Heslov says of the film's overall European tone and structure. "On a $70-million film, it's less of an art form. That's just a fact. Anton is an artist. And he's never going to tell a movie in a straightforward way. He's willing to sit on a shot for a while and not cut away. There are going to be people who are going to be absolutely frustrated by it."
Clooney says in an e-mail message that that's specifically why he wanted to make "The American."
"We wanted to do a movie in the vein of the '70s foreign films that influenced so many great filmmakers today," Clooney says. "We felt if we kept the budget low, that the outside influences (like a studio) would be minimal and we were lucky that Focus was on board with the concept from the beginning."
"The American"
The R-rated film opens today at the Cameo Art House Theatre, Market Fair 15 and Millstone 14.