The American way

In theaters Friday: I Am Number 4, Unknown

New on DVD/Blu-ray: Unstoppable, Waiting for Superman, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger

I know the Grammys are over, but quick, think about U2. What comes to mind? The Irish rock band’s record two-dozen Grammy wins? Most are more likely to picture serenely stark and mystical scenes of the four Irish rockers, rendered in black and white and standing like statues in Death Valley, Nevada. These iconic images taken for U2’s watershed 1987 album, Joshua Tree, were taken by Dutch artist Anton Corbijn. He served as the band’s longtime photographer but in 2007 lept from the world of rock ‘n’ roll to the realm of feature filmmaking with his seizing Joy Division epic Control. Corbijn had photographed the band and its late leader Ian Curtis in the 1970s, and his film was a dark love letter to their tragedies and triumphs worth seeing for anyone who listens to British new wave.

Always a visual and emotional director first and a narrative storyteller second, Corbijn follows Control with the George Clooney-led The American, a meditative and often ambling portrait of a lonely assassin hiding out in small town Italy and awaiting orders for his next—and, presumably, final—job. Jean Luc Godard once said, “All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” And while The American lends ample and intimate screen time to both, Corbijn’s film focuses largely on the internal conflict churning in Clooney’s chest rather than some overt chess match game between shooter and target.

After nearly being killed in Sweden, Clooney’s assassin contacts his boss who gives him simple instructions to lay low in an apartment in a sleepy Italian village, not talk to anyone and await further instructions. Instead, Clooney befriends the local priest, a sage and portly man who sees through Clooney’s lies immediately and engages him in philosophical conversations about the very heart this assassin has shut away for decades as a methodical, machine-like killer for hire. Clooney also draws close to a young woman looking to escape her circumstances. As she dreams of running away with this suave and mysterious American, they conduct an emotional and physical affair. Just like that, after 25 years of proficiency and perfection, he breaks his own rule twice and becomes too attached.

Based on Martin Booth’s novel A Very Private Gentleman, George Clooney gives a literally quiet performance here, but in doing so he stretches as an actor far beyond the charismatic and comical performances that come so natural to him and that he has brought to his many roles for Steven Soderbergh and the Coen Brothers. Ironically titled, The American has a tremendous European sensibility to its pace and its intentions. This film is not for everyone. This is what Stanley Kubrick might have done with a script about an assassin, made a gorgeous-looking film in the Italian countryside and asked audiences to look deeper than gunfire and car chases and love scenes. The American has those elements, but it asks audiences to look past them to the heart of the conflict, to the heart of darkness.