Watch The American For Free

Simply A Masterpiece

One of my all time favorites.

Excellent but underrated film

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

An assassin wants to quit. I expected a slow build up and frantic development. I got a frantic beginning and a slowly paced drama. The assassin is dead inside and starts to live again because of a woman. A priest nudges his thoughts. Unusual pacing and hardly any action.

Look I love Die-hard and Mission Impossible and , yes Beethoven .But you see a movie like this and you realize what the language of cinema really is. The deliberate use of the camera as a medium to tell a story not just to record images. The space to absorb the experience and appreciate the stunning cinematography.This is Day of the Jackal (the original) but in this case the assassin is not seen as just one dimensional. We really feel what this guy is going through without his having to tell us. Kind of reminds me of the writing of Elmore Leonard where the story drives the characterization. Here the camera does. This is similar in my opinion to the cinematic characterization of Scotty (Jimmy Stewart) in Vertigo.I watch a lot of Grade A junk because hey its fun. But then you hit a Tarantino movie or a Wes Anderson movie or HItchock film like Vertigo and you realize what cinematic story telling is.And when is Clooney gonna get some kind of Oscar. From a kid on an ER show to his movie chops he must get something out of it!

Is the gentleman in "The American" exclusively an assassin? Leaving aside the template novel by Martin Booth, glimpses of the protagonist's life offered by to us by this pic, make it hard to tell. But there's no doubt that Jack (George Clooney in an iconic performance) has professional duties which include top-tier sharp- shooting. There's no famous world-leader to assassinate, but a bigger inward battle inveigles his target-sight. He spends his arc in this story like a stealthy alpha beast haunted by prescience of its doom - the hunter being the hunted.Director Anton Corbijn takes this slowly simmering thriller and sculpts it with exquisitely pared-down beauty and a gnawing sense of unease. Pic is a marvel of silences and reflective oases interspersed by vistas of a postcard-pretty Italian countryside town. There are only a few characters - all of them memorable. The plot crescendoes to a climax worthy of legendary stories - it's what happens when an European and an American work towards the universal good. The nudity in this movie is a stellar example of how it can be used to superbly seductive effect , rather than being a gratuitous display of private parts. There's a rouge-lit scene in a boudoir that is stunningly erotic , as the stationary lens looks from the bed-side at the upper bodies of gently writhing lovers. Interestingly, that same celestial nudity of Violante Placido (the real-life daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli who had slayed Michael Corleone with the 'thunderbolt' in 'The Godfather's Sicilian countryside) is put to different use in a secluded brook-side setting where she happily partakes of the sylvan waters and then beckons to her lover Jack uttering "Come!!" with child-like joy. Her body adorned only by itself, gels seamlessly with the au naturelle verdant world around them, but Jack, instead of plunging into the infinite frolic of carefree lovers in a private paradise, stands frozen. Haunted by past incident, he burns inside with sudden-onset doubts of whether this nymph is his lover or his enemy.The other lady who taxes Jack's attention is the afore-mentioned Mathilde - a spectacular specimen of the very rare breed which is the female assassin. Her seeming affiliations to a haute fashion ramp melt in a cool flash when she adjusts a rifle's screws swiftly and then proceeds to sharp-shoot like a champion. Sensing something in her, Jack displays not even a flicker of emotion towards her , always maintaining with Mathilde a cool business-like demeanour. When they're done with the job at hand, Mathilde reclines by the grass and breaks the ice for the one and only time when she teases him whether he's in the habit of bringing his woman here. Students of background music would do well to educate themselves in the subtle nuances of the minimalist masterpiece that is Herbert Gronemeyer's background score. Often you're barely aware that there's any music at all but the narrative flows flawlessly. When Jack asks Clara "Will you go away with me....forever?", it is a suddenly formed scene of great and moving romance - and Gronemeyer uses touches of good ol' violin in the background to achieve blockbuster emotion by the bushel. And at the end, the maddening agony of speeding towards your lover is captured with exquisite restraint by a piano (compare and contrast this with another style of music, also accompanying a car perilously careening towards the finish line in 'Rififi').What Anton Corbijn accomplishes here , is commensurate on some key levels, with what Ashok Mehta did with a differently designed film - 'Moksha' : a career lenser assuming the directorial baton to engineer a dazzling fusion of suspense and romance. When the anatomy of an uncompromizing thriller eventually dovetails into a devastatingly poignant love story at the climax, you know that it is a story- telling triumph, that we witness only once in a blue moon. More such @ Upnworld

Utterly ghastly travesty of an adaptation. Cheapens the novel, terrible screenplay (Rowan Joffe), rotten direction (Anton Corbijn). I have known people who've seen this and said, "It's alright," and I suppose it is "alright" if you don't know how the subtle, deft, intelligent, English protagonist of a superbly original thriller has been turned into a sort of inarticulate American ex-Marine thug for George Clooney to portray.The somehow prevalent idea that Anton Corbijn is a classy art director is nonsense - he's a jumped-up music video shooter; look at the horrible mess he made of A Most Wanted Man. I certainly wish he'd done a few more Depeche Mode videos and left A Very Private Gentleman alone. Do yourself a favour: skip this garbage & order the book.