The American (2010)

Anton Corbijn's The American arrives with the patience of a man assembling a rifle in a hillside cafe, which is to say it takes its time and refuses to apologize for it. George Clooney plays Jack, an assassin hiding in the Abruzzo mountains under the name Edward, building a custom weapon for a client while befriending a priest and paying visits to a local woman. The film is austere, near-silent for long stretches, and shot with the reverence of a photographer who cannot help himself. Roger Ebert gave it four stars. Audiences gave it a D minus. Both parties were correct.

What the film declines to do is instructive. It contains no lecture, no sermon, no moral instruction of any kind. The priest asks Jack to confess and Jack refuses, and the film refuses with him. Clara, the woman he sees, is a prostitute who becomes a love interest and then a candidate for redemption, a construction the film presents without a flicker of self-examination. The cast is European and white, the politics are absent, and the closest thing to a thesis is that a man without love lives in a particular kind of hell. This is humanist, not activist. The distinction matters and the film keeps it.

It reads as a relic, which is unkind and also accurate. The screenplay adapts Martin Booth's novel A Very Private Gentleman and borrows from Leone and Melville the way a careful student borrows from a master, openly and with affection. It topped the domestic box office on its opening weekend before collapsing, a victim of a marketing campaign that promised gunfights and delivered fog. We are left with a clean, unadorned specimen, culturally inert in every direction we care to measure, and quietly pleased about it.