George Clooney (15 page)

The film's general attitude to its subject is one of respect. Irene cares enough for Michael to see him off at the dockside, Sully responds to a fellow human being (Murph) to save his life, and Murph shows magnanimity toward his ex-wife's new partner. The final scene is the church service to the men, and the film as a whole is clearly a testament to their memory.
Their full names remind us of how wider society views them, but the final words are Tyne's impassioned speech about moving out of harbor, giving the ending the veneer of an upbeat ending as well as reflecting the notions of the men's souls setting forth on a spiritual journey. Throughout, there is a wish not to alienate the Gloucester community, but all this admirable behavior is a little too close to lionization to make the film dramatically credible and engaging as a whole.

It has been 10 years now since Clooney starred in an overtly action-driven picture.
The American
, although trailed as an action film, is far more of an exploration of an individual's soul. Part of this shift is probably due to a wish to produce a body of work more thoughtful and dialogue based in nature and partly due to the simple mechanics of age. It becomes more difficult, as Sean Connery and Roger Moore found, to be accepted as the credible hero of an action narrative into one's 50s. There is a personal element too in the toll that such films take on the human body. After injuring himself quite seriously on
Syriana
, Clooney may well think long and hard about accepting such roles in the future, possibly one reason behind his dropping out of a remake of
The Man from Uncle
.

Genre is one of the key concepts by which viewers make sense of what they watch. It is one of the key factors that we use to help decide whether we even choose to watch a film at all. To the experience of any given film we each bring a host of assumptions about kinds of locations, situations, dialogue, and forms of resolution that we expect. If the filmmaker disrupts those expectations too sharply, we may react with confusion, boredom, or even anger. If generic boundaries are not pushed at all, a film may seem wholly predictable and forgettable. It is a notable feature of Clooney's career that since 1997, he has chosen to be involved with films that stretch generic boundaries, sometimes significantly further than critics and general audiences expect, and in particular to blend existing genres.

The difficulties for some viewers perhaps lie in the genres, which the film attempts to mix (gangster, western, and horror). The film is really a celebration of exploitation cinema, and reviewers unfamiliar with this often criticize the film by unwittingly listing the typical components of this subgenre: a blend of big-star names with an unapologetically lurid portrayal of sex, violence, and special effects.

The opening sequence ends before the titles roll with Seth Gecko (George Clooney) berating his brother, Richie (Quentin Tarantino), about the meaning of the term “low-profile”: “It is not taking girls hostage. It is not shooting police. It is not setting fire to a building.” With a less brutal scene before this, such dialogue might find its natural home
in a comedy or buddy movie. The theatricality of the opening scene in the store is underlined as Rodriguez's camera pans from the ranger as he briefly exits the scene to reveal the Gecko brothers in hiding, bringing them forward into shot and then pushing them back out again. It feels like a more decorous theatrical form of art with which Richie has no patience, unable to wait for his cue but stepping onto the “stage” of the action and acting preemptively, shooting the ranger with little apparent justification.

The progression of the main section of the narrative, once the characters are holed up at the club, slides into more familiar monster movie territory, anticipated by the red, George Romero-style titles at the beginning. The presence of special effects expert and horror director Tom Savini in the cast, and a narrative that quickly descends into a series of battles to the death with supernatural creatures, shift the film into low-budget horror.

From the outset, we are not in a fictional landscape dominated by realism. Richie holds up his hand with a hole blown in it, not to howl in pain but to look through it at Seth in wonder. The same shot had already been used in
Terminator II
(James Cameron, 1991) and would reappear in the TV movie of Stephen King's
Thinner
(Tom Holland, 1996). If this were not enough, as the car drives out of shot Rodriguez gives us a privileged view through the body of the car to the female hostage being held within, perhaps influenced by Michel Gondry's 1993 video for Björk's
Human Behavior
, which featured a similar shot of the singer being eaten by a bear but remaining visible in its stomach. The fact that Cheech Marin plays not only a border guard (with a badge reading “Oscar Marin,” the name of his real father) but also the parts of Chet Pussy and Carlos suggests that there is less a focus on fully rounded psychological characters than on action. Similarly, Texas Ranger Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) is killed in this film but reappears playing the same character in volume 1 of Tarantino's
Kill Bill
(2003),
Deathproof
(2007), and
Planet Terror
(2007).

There is tongue-in-cheek character naming with Kelly Houge as a newscaster played by Kelly Preston (known for her modeling work at the time). The naming of the Fuller family (Jacob, Kate, and Scott) is a conscious reference to Sam Fuller, seminal director of pulp fiction cinema. The naming of Sex Machine is a gag for the director playing him (Tom Savini) and that he will become a blood-seeking “machine” like the other vampires in the film. Casting includes figures chosen more for their physical appearance or notoriety in other spheres rather than acting talent, like Frost (former NFL defensive back Fred Williamson). Rodriguez, known for his ultra-low-budget breakthrough hit
El Mariachi
in 1992 at the Sundance Festival, also appears in the band in the club and edited the film too.

However, the most interesting aspect of the film falls not so much in the vampire element but in the film's first 20 minutes. In this we have George Clooney, Dr. Ross of
ER
, being rude and disrespectful to an old motel keeper, subsequently punching another old man, a pastor no less, and threatening to shoot him in the face in front of his daughter. Clooney's character swears aggressively at his captives, and from the very opening sequence and the information given to us via a TV bulletin, he and his brother seem prepared to kill others in order to escape. He is a bad-mouthed, ruthless killer. He is prepared to indulge in homophobic and racist abuse, asking Jacob (Harvey Keitel) and Scott (Ernest Liu) if they are “a couple of fags,” and assumes Scott is Japanese before Richie corrects him that Chinese is more likely.

There is an interesting paradox here. Seth promises that he will release them unharmed if they help them get through the border to Mexico. Jacob must have faith in the word of another and Seth must decide if he will keep “his word” (given earlier to the unfortunate female hostage left in Richie's care). Issues of faith and belief run under the relationships here, not just in the obvious sense of a pastor who cannot bring himself to preach any longer after the tragic death of his wife. This is also reflected in the language of the script with Seth declaring that giving up a percentage of ill-gotten gains to the local crime gangs is “scripture … So it is written, so shall it be done.” He operates under different conventions of morality than Jacob, but the need for some form of order and rules permeates both criminal and religious codes of belief.

Clooney makes a visually striking villain here, dressed in black, with cropped hair and a snake-like tattoo rising up his neck. He is shot several times in the opening section from extreme low angle (from the back of the car as he unloads food at the motel and later holding a gun to Scott and Jacob in their room). Kate (Juliette Lewis) describes him as a “creepy guy” when their bus first almost collides into him, but his salute with a beer bottle and his usual smoldering look do not really convey “creepy,” suggesting Kate is using such terminology to deny her own attraction to him. Verbally, he alternates between being bullying and charming, encouraging Scott and Kate after they have followed orders, like a personal coach.

Ten years before David Cronenberg's brutal opening in
A History of Violence
(2006), we have two apparently amoral robbers, prepared to kill to get what they want from small-town motels. Agent Robert Newman describes the film as “being about a couple of serial killers,” but while this
may reflect the disturbed side of Richie, it misrepresents the character of Seth Gecko.
¹
Particularly important, Seth is defined in opposition to his brother Richie, to whom his sibling loyalty overcomes any qualms he might have about Richie's deeply disturbed and sick attitude to women. Richie is the real evil here. His sly, predatory glances at any nearby female are clear from the outset, and his delusional fantasies in which Kate invites him to perform an intimate act on her, which, Rodriguez's close-up subjective shot of her makes subsequently clear occurred only in his head, mark him as the dangerous sex offender.

The episode in the motel defines the distinction between the nature of Richie and Seth. Left alone with a hostage, Richie retires to a back room to watch TV and pats the bed next to him, indicating that his petrified woman should join him. When Seth returns, it is only some minutes into his conversation that he freezes with a choice of burgers in hand and no hostage to give it to. Rodriguez's camera pans to an empty seat and Richie explains in a casual offhand manner, pointing at the bedroom, “She's in there.” In stepping into the doorway, Seth occupies this position, just looking, trying to make sense of what he is seeing, for over 35 seconds without a cut. There is no conventional reverse shot, giving us a privileged view of action, but we share with Seth a series of very fast flash-cuts as key images are seared onto his consciousness (a bloodied phone, blood sprayed on furniture, and perhaps most shocking, a blood-covered body with a head covered with a pillow, marked with the scorch marks of several pistol blasts). A category error is occurring in Seth's mind. A hostage has been altered into an abject dehumanized corpse, a map of Richie's perversions, with a key clue in the tape that was on his hands now used to bind those of the woman. It is only after Seth turns away that Rodriguez allows us a partial view of the room, the central gruesome sight blocked by Seth's body (as if he is shielding us from our own worst impulses in looking).

He asks a question, essentially rhetorical in nature (“What is wrong with you?”), and the answer, which he himself provides himself, almost reads as a definition of the Clooney on-screen persona and brand: “I'm a professional fucking thief. I don't kill people that I don't have to and I don't rape women.” He may have played occasional amoral characters like Jack in
The American
but outright, unredeemable evil of the sort represented by Richie here has not appeared in his résumé. Even in the opening scene, he shoots the storekeeper because he threatens them with a gun, not like Richie's random shooting of the ranger (claiming the victims were trying to signal to one another). Seth struggles to assert some kind of order on events, even a sense of a code of honor among thieves,
forcing Richie to admit by brute-force grabbing hold of his lapels that what he (Richie) is doing “is not how it's done.”

In the store, in the motel, and in the bar, Seth is the one with the patter, the one who makes the threats, who defines the situation. Rodriguez gives us a stylized medium close-up of Clooney, holding a gun in a threatening pose in a low angle, exuding threatening cool in all three locations with the gun blurred in the extreme foreground. Such a role seems credible for Clooney from early on in his film career, even though he was far from first choice for the part and was cast only once John Travolta, Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth, and Christopher Walken all passed. However, there is some wilful blindness in his character here as clearly Seth does know “what is wrong with” Richie whose promise under compulsion not to do it again has the sense of a schoolboy promising not to be naughty. This is very much a sibling bond based on inequalities. Seth as the elder, more responsible brother makes the sensible plans (getting to Mexico, meeting a contact, and lying low in El Rey), looking after his brother like a nurse, buying food, redressing the wound, and telling him to put his “bit” in while they drive to stop him grinding his teeth. Most obviously, Seth uses hostages to gain some advantage rather than just killing them. Richie whines childishly and complains about having to give a percentage of their loot to a local gang but Seth accepts the situation more realistically. Where Richie is impulsive, vicious, and sadistic, Seth is calm and brutal only for a purpose (interrupting Richie's later complaining in the van, for example, by knocking him out rather than letting him give them away). The fact that Seth is not Richie is a clear point in his favor, but the fact that he so easily forgives him is not.

Richie's lust for Kate is signaled by a whooshing, rumbling sound effect when he projects his fantasy onto her (a similar distorted, rushing sound is used later to convey the vampire's desire for his bloody hand), and Rodriguez gives us his distorted subjective point of view with a wide-angle lens as he picks up the car keys at her feet. In the van, we cut between a series of dissolves of Richie looking and (apparently nonsexual) parts of Kate's body, especially her feet. Rodriquez's use of Jimmie Vaughan's “Dengue Woman Blues” (1996) in the score here with lyrics like “You've got me all crazy” is a disturbing assumption of a sex attacker's point of view, not only literally but also seeing complicity on the part of the desired individual.