George Clooney (37 page)

As a character, Jack is also far from simple. For the first time, we see Clooney play a character that shoots an apparently innocent girl (with whom he had some form of relationship), and yet via a blend of performance, direction, and script his character retains an element of viewer sympathy. It is not until he meets Clara (Violante Placido) that he addresses another character face-to face at length. He avoids direct eye contact where possible, denying himself the kinds of human contact that he knows his chosen profession makes impossible to sustain. As Pavel (Johan Leysen) tells him, “Don't make any friends.” However, either by luck or simply that others respond to a need they feel in him, other characters do reach out to him, most obviously the priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli). Invited to the priest's house, Jack sits at a table with him but does not look at him; and in making contact with Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), the pair sit at adjacent tables at an outdoor café again avoiding direct glances. The opening credits, played out over a lengthy
shot as Jack drives down a road tunnel, suggest a shadowy character whose destiny is set on a particular course.

Once in Castel del Monte, Corbijn takes this a stage further with a large number of tightly framed shots of Jack, often from directly behind him, which might be the point of view of an assassin about to stab him in the back, but since Jack frequently twirls around as he walks, it suggests the presence of an entity, closely following, almost like a notion of conscience. The geography of the town is never made clear. Jack approaches his small apartment from different routes, and in several scenes we see him walking at night shot from in front and behind with tight shots that do not allow us to see clearly where he is going or whether he is being followed. From the first time he walks through the town in daylight, the narrow medieval streets, blind corners, and steps that seem to go back on themselves form a visual fabric like an Escher picture, creating a Kafkaesque, paranoid sense of being watched and followed. This creates ambiguity from the outset, like the backfiring scooter, before it is clear there are specific assassins seeking to kill Jack. As the pressure mounts, we have a slowly rotating top-shot above the rooftops of the town, still denying us a sense of precise geography, and cut with a soaring bird of prey, suggesting the gathering of forces against him.

Corbijn's former profession surfaces not just in his picture composition or the choice of photographer as an alibi for Jack but in the numerous spectacular long shots of Castel del Monte, sometimes at night or with mist rolling in. There are many, many shots of a single car winding through the landscape, mostly in extreme long shot, both day and night, emphasizing just how alone Jack is but also creating something of the cold aesthetic of car commercials or pictures used for calendars. This is reflected in the tie-in publication,
Inside the American
(2010), which showcases Corbijn's extraordinary eye for minor detail and the relationship of framing and available light.

Gradually, through glimpses of his tattoo, the book that he drops on waking, and the nickname given him oddly by both Clara and Mathilde (“Mr. Butterfly”), suggesting some kind of link between them, we realize that Jack does have an interior life, albeit one starved of the oxygen of human contact. He takes Mathilde to the riverside spot as much for its nature as for the isolation it affords them. The romantic connotation in the notion of a riverside picnic is destroyed by his profession. On dropping Mathilde back at the station, she thanks him for a lovely day at which his head drops. This is the best he seems able to hope for. A beautiful woman and a romantic setting (opportunity and motivation in crime terms) are
not enough. He is suppressing his need for human contact and we see its toll on his spirit, writ large in his careworn face and tears welling up.

At dinner, he buys Clara a rose, which she says make them look like a couple, at which Herbert Grönemeyer's piano theme cuts in (used relatively sparingly throughout) to underline that, as Jack tears up again, he realizes that they can never be like that. His profession makes him suspect everyone, poisoning relationships so that he imagines Clara is carrying a gun to kill him, leading to the tense scene by the river and destroying its potential for romance. The first time the scene was spoiled by the presence of active evil, the second time by the suspicion of evil, and the third and final time because it arrives too late for Jack to exploit.

Clooney appears in virtually every scene. With a relatively small cast, the appearance of other characters matters only as they relate to him, almost as aspects of his own personality. We are offered some new sides to his film persona. His naked torso is seen performing press-ups, chin-ups, and some impressive stretching exercises. His body here seems functional rather than in condition to be looked at. He also has a previously unseen profession: not just that of killer but of gun maker. Despite protesting the contrary, Father Benedetto notes that Jack is good with machines, perhaps in lieu of human contact. The speed with which he manages to find useful components from the junk in the garage of Benedetto's son, Fabio, may stretch credibility, but Corbijn's cropped shots suggest Jack's hands almost act independently of his body in weighing the suitability of various tools and spare parts.

We also have the longest love scene in the Clooney canon in an extremely erotic encounter with Clara. As elsewhere, Corbijn refuses to cut to close-ups but allows his actors to pass out of shot before coming back, remaining focused for the most part on Clara's face, as she appears to be enjoying what Jack is doing. He says afterward that she does not have to act with him and that he just wants her “to be exactly who you are,” which suggests both that he is tired of the phoniness of his life but also that her show of pleasure was in some measure faked. The morality of her job does not seem to trouble him, even when she says she is carrying a gun because she is scared of being attacked (there have been attacks on prostitutes nearby) and she must work that night; i.e., she is sleeping with other men for money while appearing to be in love with him. He claims earlier that he does not visit other women, reflecting an oddly chivalrous view of fidelity, but is apparently relaxed about her not doing the same. Perhaps his attitude to her job and her name, suggesting clarity, is suggestive of a forgiving nature, interested in souls more than physical actions.

It is clearly a tale of sin and redemption, most obviously in the dawn exchange between Jack and the priest but from the outset too in the cross seen in the foreground of the shot of Castel del Monte, the priest looking down benevolently above Jack as he walks down the steep alleyways for the first time and the doleful bell that punctuates the narrative. However, Jack does not heed the call to prayer, using the bell sound to cover his action in hammering a part of the gun he is making. At the moment he finishes the gun and later the fake briefcase, he lays his hands on it in an act of apparent blessing or finds a moment of peace. Unlike Father Benedetto, who crosses himself before eating, this small act suggests Jack finds the possibility of grace in his everyday actions, as if his body is instinctively looking for spiritual peace, even if he does not consciously recognize it. By the end despite being offered the chance to confess and purge his soul, Jack bypasses orthodox religion, noting earlier “I don't think God's very interested in me.” Looking down at Mathilde as she lies dying from the rifle misfire he instigated, it is he who administers a form of the last rites, demanding who she works for. In his naiveté, he still has not realized the source of his betrayal (or in some sense is in denial). His redemption is in the form of preventing an assassination by sabotaging the rifle, killing his betrayer (Pavel), but most of all struggling to meet Clara by the river.

With overtones of a cleansing baptism, his angrily thumping the steering wheel reflects the frustration of the timing. He finds someone whom he can love and who loves him at exactly the point that his past catches up with him. Just as Clara treads on the bullets discarded from the scene trying out the rifle, so he cannot escape his past. Whether he likes it or not, he is a product of his history. He has tried to live solely in the present but he cannot. However, the fact that he can appreciate such fragile beauty in his love of butterflies among the brutality of a world of killing (albeit partly at his instigation) suggests that he still has the capacity for redemption. Corbijn pans away from Jack's actual moment of death and focuses on a nearby tree upon which a butterfly (his soul perhaps) seems to be fluttering. As Jack noted earlier, the creature, like his state of grace, is “endangered.”

Corbijn, in interviews, makes much of the attempt to follow the basic structure of a western, and certainly there are elements here, particularly of the spaghetti westerns of figures like Sergio Leone, like the rugged landscape, the presence of a stranger in town who must atone for past sins of living by violence, a hero torn between the demands of the flesh (the prostitute) and the spirit (the priest), a final shoot-out, as well as a leisurely shot length and pace of narrative action. Sitting alone in a bar,
Leone's classic western,
Once upon a Time in the West
(1968), is on-screen, at the point where the killer, Frank (Henry Fonda), callously shoots an innocent small boy just because he heard a name. It is a reminder of the forces that are gathering against Jack but also of his own callous murder of Ingrid. He will have to atone for his sins as a killer too (also at the hands of a fellow assassin who arrives by train like the characters in the Leone film).

However, we do not have the exchange of direct looks that Leone is also famous for, there is minimal backstory, and in a sense the nationality of Jack is not central (Rowan Joffe's script changes him from the Englishman in Martin Booth's 1990 novel,
A Very Private Gentleman
). It is the state of his soul that is paramount. Whereas most westerns make it clear exactly what is being fought over, here the relative scarcity of narrative information converts Jack's increasingly paranoid existence into an existential drama. As Father Benedetto sees, Jack is in a hell of his own making in which he destroys everything he comes into contact with, which is why he does not tell Clara his secret so that she remains spiritually pure, despite her profession, and why he is attracted to butterflies as the sole symbol of fragile beauty and potential metamorphosis in his world. This is change at a profound level, not the kind symbolized by Mathilde's changing hairstyle at every meeting.

Most powerfully, in the final sequence as he struggles to control the car despite being wounded, Clooney's face manages to capture not just physical pain but the spiritual pain of having his final chance of happiness snatched away from him at the last. It makes the manner of his death deeply tragic, and the riverside location, the place Clara terms “paradise,” gains its fullest meaning from his final entrance, his hand raised in greeting.

Although
The American
might seem a watershed in Clooney's acting, reflecting a more somber, elegiac mood in which a sense of sorrow and loss infects the present, this is present in earlier work too. Personal grief in
Solaris
is partly modulated into political grief in
Syriana
at the corrosion of principles to religious grief here. From the opening shot where Clooney is slumped by the bed to his car scene with Clara after the picnic, he is framed looking down and needing the physical (and apparently spiritual) comfort of another. He is a lost soul, one who can maintain his body via exercise—it is his weapon after all—but who cannot gain any mental peace. This is present even in apparently minor scenes, such as his dinner with the priest, where we see Jack toying with a small crucifix and a version of “Madam Butterfly” is being sung in the background.

Cinematic trailers played up the action scenes, and with the dominant icon on posters and DVD cases being Jack in midstride, carrying a gun,
the impression is of an action thriller. However, in this the film was misrepresented, in part contributing to some audience disappointment. The film is a study of the interior price paid by one man's soul for the sinful life he has led. Guns are present, but even in the scenes where they are assembled, they are not fetishized (the riverside scene where Mathilde puts the rifle together focuses on Jack's reaction, and the assembly process is conveyed almost entirely by sound effects).

Corbijn and Clooney wanted to keep to the agreed location despite the earthquake in the region in Abruzzo five months before shooting was due to begin, in order to help support regeneration efforts. It is hard not to see Clooney the man here, at home in Italian cafés, being able to understand the language around him, watching and attracting the attention of beautiful young women. When he smiles and invites Clara for a coffee (or, in a deleted scene, she offers him a strong coffee to ease his shoulder pain), the crossover into a Nespresso commercial is almost complete. For the Italian public, familiar with Clooney's commercials for Fastweb and Fiat alongside his film career, allowing him great wealth, a luxurious home, and global fame, he personifies the possibilities of American life.

Clooney's breakdown at the end of Alexander Payne's
The Descendants
(2011) may seem new, but that level of emotional complexity has been present in his performances reaching back as far as
Solaris
(2002), through
Michael Clayton
(2007),
Syriana
(2008),
Up in the Air
(2010), and
The American
(2010). Chris Kelvin, Michael Clayton, Bob Barnes, Ryan Bingham, Jack in
The American
, even Harry Pfarrer in
Burn after Reading
—all of these characters are inches away from mental collapse. Perhaps reflecting this growing sense of interiority,
The Descendants
uses voice-over extensively, like Payne's
About Schmidt
(2002) (and in the early sections of
Up in the Air
), which is perhaps justifiable initially given the amount of backstory about the legal question of the land as well as following the first person narrative of the source text, but it may still seem intrusive to some viewers.