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Clooney is coolest assasin on the block in "The American"

By Daniel Levine, Staff Writer

"The American," directed by Danish filmmaker Anton Corbijan, is a picture that could be summed up in one sentence. Someone wants George Clooney's character dead.

The film features Clooney as Jack…or Edward…or Mr. Butterfly, who is an assassin. This time though, his job is not to pull the trigger – just supply the weapon. Corbijan then goes on to give the audience the most beautiful sequence to feature the construction of a custom rifle in film. Clooney's eyes are glues to his hands, as he fills bullet shells with mercury and screws a sound dampener on the barrel. He is indeed more of a craftsman than an artist, as Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) so eloquently puts it.

Corbijan's film seems to owe much to maverick Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose films could also be summed up in one sentence and during which the characters are never the center of attention. In "The American," there is a shot of Clooney sitting at a bar, although it will take the viewer a second to find him because he is hiding in the bottom corner of the frame. The cinematography by Martin Ruhe is beautiful, clashing with the dark, violent plot going on before the viewers' eyes.

The acting in the film is also much more subdued than you might expect from George Clooney. He is calm, quiet – exactly what the picture needs him to be – and perfect at his job, much like Michael Clayton in Tony Gilroy's 2007 film of the same name. In that one, though, Clooney is much more vocal. Clayton fights with words. Mr. Butterfly, so named because of his tattoo, fights with a gun. Essentially, this makes him one-dimensional, which is true about all the characters. Rowan Joffe's script (based on the novel "A Very Quiet Gentleman" by Martin Booth) leaves no room for anyone in the film to have any motive but what they tell us. The rest of the characters are played by various European actors, so Clooney is the only name an American audience will recognize. The beautiful Italian singer Violante Placido plays Clara, a prostitute with whom Mr. Butterfly hopes to escape. She's very good in the role and her lack of ability to keep clothes on certainly fits the character. Veteran actor Bonacelli plays probably the most interesting character, Benedetto, who shares the seemingly endless hypocrisies of the church with Mr. Butterfly.

"The American" is certainly a film that is beautiful to look at, making one think that Clooney probably took the role so he could take a vacation. However, no one else today could play this assassin character quite like Clooney. He just screams cool, combining an elder Cary Grant in Hitchcock's "To Catch A Thief" with the youth of Alain Delon in Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai." He makes this film what it is, which is one of the best of the year.

George Clooney stars in "The American" (Photo Courtesy of Focus Features)

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