CAUTION: Contains “spoilers.”
Director Anton Corbjn and script-writers Rowan Joffe and Maren Booth might not have intended their 2010 film The American to serve as a homage to the French director Jean-Pierre Melville, but it sure came out looking like one. But Melville was one of those unique directors such that even if you succeed, you lose. Casting an affable presence like George Clooney as a sullen assassin hiding out in an Italian hill town might have sounded good on paper, but he lacked the aura of doom that Melville always cloaked his characters in. You expected him to come out on top, even as you realized that the demands of the genre insisted that he die. Also, by casting Clooney, you built audience expectations that this would be an action-film. When Melville cast American actor Richard Crenna–not known as an action star–as slick thief operating in France, there was no such expectation, so his final downbeat demise left audiences with no sense of being cheated. If, for instance, Die Hard had ended with Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman shooting each other, how would that have stuck audiences? Yes, you argue but Willis was playing a cop and Rickman, a murderous thief, here Clooney was an assassin and adversaries Thekla Reusen and Johan Leysen were also assassins, so why not have Clooney prevail over his nastier rivals? (Of course, Clooney shooting his girlfriend in the back in the opening minutes of the film marked him as no prize-package either.)
The film has been criticized with being slow-moving, which it is, but I had no problem with the film’s pacing. What bothered me was its lack of soul. Soul? In a movie about an assassin who wants to retire? Yes. Even a genre film, albeit with artistic pretentions, needs to have a heartbeat. Again, Melville could conclude The Red Circle with his favorite leading man Alain Delon and his colleagues Yves Montand and Gian-Maria Volonte gunned down in a police ambush and leave its audience feeling that it had seen a logical outcome. You could pull off a million-dollar jewel robbery and still be tripped up by a middle-aged cop who loves his pet cats more than he loves people. But Eddie tripped up by his “manager” Pavel? He should have known better. Also, while Melville films the deaths of his three protagonists in a flat, pitiless manner, Corbjn cheats by making it appear that Clooney has beaten Leysen to the draw. Only as he drives off to keep a rendezvous with his lover do we see blood on the steering wheel. I guess the decision to have Clooney expire before his lover can reach him was supposed to be tragic, but I preferred John Huston’s approach in The Asphalt Jungle, allowing Sterling Hayden’s dying hooligan to reach his former family farm, dying in its field, surrounded by the horses that he loved. If nothing else, it was more poetic, even if it was filmed as a long shot.
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