White snow and early-morning, clouded sky swallow the frame. Gunshots interrupt a dead silence and plodding boots crunch and slosh in the snow. Passerbys' reflections on the pastry shop's window dance in front of the protagonist's face like mocking phantoms. Every shot seems just long enough to allow the eye to capture all of the rich details.
These are the treats in the opening scenes of “The American,” and many more continue to show up throughout the film. Hiding in a small town while a stay in Sweden goes awry, Jack (the never-aging George Clooney) performs another job in Italy, what he believes will be his last. While designing the perfect gun for another spy (who happens to be a very pretty woman), Jack regularly sleeps with a gorgeous prostitute. The plot sounds like hundreds of spy movies that have been made since the heyday of Carol Reed and Alfred Hitchcock, but “The American” works to make the movie more about Jack than about the spy world. What could have easily been a second-rate thriller featuring tits-and-ass and blow-'em-up violence turns into a carefully told, tightly wound story that involves a character whose weaknesses are on the dangerous verge of revealing themselves—and, unfortunately for Jack, sometimes they do.
The film is deliberately-paced and meditative, and director Anton Corbijn's cinematography-focused style couldn't be more appropriate for this material. The film's deft technique helps the audience sense the same paranoia that plagues Jack. “The American” is in color as opposed to Corbijn's previous film, “Control,” about the rise and fall of Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division. Whereas Corbijn employs textures and gradations in the black-and-white realm of 1960s England, “The American” features earth tones from the rural Italian setting along with rich green grass during the day and orange lamplights at night. Not only is the movie pretty to look at, but the cinematography also works thematically. In one scene, instead of racking focus to see who is in the car behind Jack, the camera focuses on his reaction first, still leaving the identity of the person in the car a total mystery to us. Once he turns back to check on the car, we finally get to see what he sees. Essentially, we're steeped in his paranoia.
This is, in fact, Jack's greatest conflict: He has to look beyond his own personal scope in order to find the answer to his existentialist malaise. As strong as Jack seems to be—his tough physical exterior and emotional interior seems equally calloused—the butterfly motif throughout the film serves more than just to show how he wants to change his lifestyle. He has a butterfly tattoo on his back and is dubbed “Mr. Butterfly” by several characters. Like the fragile creatures, Jack is sensitive to the touch. If one comes into contact with a butterfly's wings, all the poor animal can do is wither and die.
“You're an American. You think you can escape history,” suggests an avuncular priest to Jack. “I try, Father,” he responds knowingly. He indeed tries to escape, but if he isn't escaping emotionally, he's escaping physically, and he has to decide which one he would rather do.
In both style and character, “The American” is reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola's “The Conversation,” which features some of the best use of sound in any movie. Although Corbijn's film focuses more on camerawork, the parallels of a paranoid professional trying to learn from his mistakes on the job while doing what he thinks is right are unavoidable. “The American,” however, holds its own against Coppola's classic, re-shaping the same basic story to its own needs, like how Akira Kurosawa's “Ran” is a re-shaping of “King Lear.”
Despite easy comparison, “The American” remains an absorbing story about a reasonable, intelligent man who cannot enjoy himself without being paranoid about his life without second-guessing who wants to love him and who is willing to kill him.
