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GEORGE CLOONEY and VIOLANTE PLACIDO star in the The American.

By  Sandra Olmsted

The most important thing the opening of a film can do is to make the audience care about the main character, but Dutch director Anton Corbijn provides, instead of empathy, a puzzle:

Should the audience empathize with the American, (George Clooney), who has killed the two men who were trying to kill him in the opening scene and the woman “friend,” who he claims was “innocent” but who would have been a witness?

So, in the most minimalist of terms, with all the conventions of the European retro thriller, including the bleakly beautiful cinematography, the settings frozen in a half-century time warp, and the small foreign cast — save Clooney, Corbijn lays out his puzzle.

The American, aka Mr. Butterfly, Jack, or Edward, is certainly a man who can kill, strategize, and construct weapons, but why does the audience keep watching him?  The film is plodding; the bleakness is pervasive, and the dialogue is, well, almost nonexistent, but puzzles intrigue.

After killing the three people in Sweden, the American hitman runs to Italy and calls, Pavel (Johan Leysen), who seems to be his boss or handler.  Pavel directs Jack to go to a specific mountain top village in the remote countryside and to stay away from women.  Of course, Jack chooses the next mountain top village over and soon is involved with a prostitute, Clara (Violante Placido), who works in an establishment that seems usually large for a town so small.

Jack also makes friends with the local Catholic priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), whose son is the local auto mechanic, and Jack and Benedetto discuss sin repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Pavel gives Jack an assignment to make a weapon for Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), and the Swedes have tracked Jack down, with expected results.  The locals, despite one of their own being killed, don’t seem to mind the gunplay in their streets.

The story slowly comes to a climax as the various parties move toward the inevitable conclusions of their characters’ stories.

What the audience should be asking is not whether they should empathize with Jack, but why Jack is the only American in the film.  Why does Corbijn’s emotionally dead killer have to be an American?  Now that is the true philosophical problem in the film.

Corbijn would have his American be the villain, a puppet of other interests, and a hitman willing to kill the innocent, make friends for all the wrong reasons, and provide weapons when ever asked.

The performances are solid, and the actors rely mostly on the visual, such as expressions and body language, to convey meaning.  Herbert Grönemeyer’s original music, Martin Ruhe’s cinematography, Andrew Hulme’s film editing, and Rowan Joffe’s screenplay, based on Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman, are the perfect accompaniment to the minimalistic bleakness of the story.

Corbijn’s artsy, minimalist pseudo thriller doesn’t thrill much, and the long awaited climax is hardly a surprise, having been telegraphed repeatedly to the audience, but the film keeps the audience enthralled with thoughts of what might happen or perhaps that something will happen.

In the end, the audience does care what happens to Jack, the American, who doesn’t fit in Corbijn’s Europe.  The American, a Focus Features release, is rated R for violence, sexual content, and nudity and runs 103 minutes.

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