The American’s first two shot is of George Clooney, in a black tank, beard by Salt & Pepper, being idly embraced by some girl. As Clooney has made a second career out of befriending and bedding women who are indistinguishable from each other, it’s the first sign that Anton Corbijn is about to get editorial. If your first biopic does nothing to demythologize the most mythologized singer north of Kurt, maybe you think it’s better to make up stuff about your subject. Clooney is the subject, not the star, of The American, which is so accidentally diagnostic about movie stars, the myth of masculinity, and the closet I can’t believe it wasn’t banned in America.
Even if you doubt its intentionality, your way into finding The American the most subversive movie of the last several years is imagining it was made by the ultimate conspiracist: someone who actually knows something. The title means everything and nothing, really; the movie is taken from the novel A Very Private Gentleman, the title of which means everything. Reviewing it for NYT, A.O. Scott remembered archetypal figures like Eastwood and McQueen as though Clooney compares to them. But the actor Clooney mirrors most, Cary Grant, is the Abraham Lincoln of the movies. Anton Corbijn slyly found the HGGCG and he is George Clooney himself.
The American is structured like a Michael Ondaatje novel. It has to do with work, the serial-number specifics of it, and how life often feels like a terrible waste of time for certain kinds of people—men, mostly. There’s a lot of exhaustion in Clooney’s character, who’s not a hitman so much as he’s a hit middleman. He procures or constructs specialized weaponry for bloody-thinking clientele, who are personified in the movie by a kind of sweater-dressed Marlee Matlin spam. This is Woman No. 1, Mathilde. She calls Clooney Mr. Butterfly but besides that is basically all business.
Woman No. 2 is the intoxicatingly imperfect Clara (Violante Placido). If you ever read Puppet On A Chain by the British suspense novelist Alistair MacLean, whose dankness is a necessary primer for this material, Clara is a brunetted Belinda, right down to the mutinied canines. She’s naked like half the movie, and is presumably fucking Clooney; except the first time there’s a wipe before anything visible happens, and the second time he just goes down on her a lot. She also calls Clooney Mr. Butterfly; of the two women she’s the one he thinks is trying to kill him. He’s wrong.
Clara is a prostitute and the conceit is that she quits being a prostitute for Clooney. Now, there is no way that would happen! Except they’re at dinner, and she says two very important things: “Perhaps you do not have a woman in your life?” and “You’re a good man but you have a secret.” Clooney demurs but it’s still easy to see why Clara is the first movie prostitute whose heart ever went full Midas: she’s not doing it for a man. She knows why she & Clooney can never be together and she not only respects that, she will never require another thing from a straight man. Clooney is outed without uttering a word. Until movie’s end, he’s gay as Dillinger.
Corbijn ablutes you in other evidence, all the way back to the beginning. When Clooney blunders out into the Swedish snow with his then-current girlfriend, someone starts shooting. After he locates and kills the shooter, he is visibly freaking out and, in one of the twistiest opening moves in a movie ever, executes his girlfriend. This isn’t the usual infantile externalization of the murdered-wife fantasy; he’s covering his tracks both literally and figuratively. Why leave a living witness to what he really is?
He absconds to Italy—first he shaves, then he absconds. Italy is large in the public’s imagination of Clooney. He’s got the villa on Lake Como where he pals around with Bono. An Italian model, Elisabetta Canalis, is the most recent in a medium-long line of ex-girlfriends who don’t really do that much (Sarah Larson was on Fear Factor or something? Lisa Snowdon is the world’s biggest Christy Turlington fan?). And he’s really dashing exactly like the Italian guys Parker Posey wanted to move to New York to meet in Waiting For Guffman.
In Italy he meets a priest who pretends to believe Clooney is a photographer who works with architecture and landscapes. The priest cuts a baleful/comic figure: he says things like “all men are sinners—some are greater sinners than others” (which, he’s not Southern Baptist but I think we know which kinds of sinners he means) and “you cannot doubt the existence of hell—you live in it”. It’s the direct opposite of what Ricky Roma said in #GGR. But Clooney acts haggard enough to confirm either one.
The priest follows Clooney through the movie like a taciturn specter. They have tense, tussling verbal set-tos under olive trees. During the conclusional set piece, ragged and colorful and seventies-wave, the priest is the last person Clooney sees after committing his last act of violence, against his own assassin whom he helped arm. This is Woman No. 1. Woman No. 2 waits in an assigned place, but Clooney, gunshot himself, doesn’t make it there alive. His secret is presumably safe with her. With us, not so much.
