Pbenjay's Blog

THE AMERICAN

Run George Run

YUP that’s right – the title is a spoiler so if you don’t want to know anymore about the movie STOP READING now.

So here we have a thinner, trimmer George Clooney and unless he had a body double (duh!) he also showed off some very visible Pecs and Lats.  He bears the same sad, detached and tired demeanor that was characteristic of  Michael Clayton.  These characters are haunted men,   weighted down under the heavy cloak of their misdeeds and sleepless over their sins.  Was it all done in the line of duty? Duty?? We’re not talking about a soldier in the defense of his nation – we’re talking about MONEY, mercenaries if you will, a gun for hire, well  Mr. Clark kills, I don’t think an actual death was part of Michael Clayton’s job description.

Anyway the travelogue is beautiful as Mister Butterfly flits through Sweden and Rome and into the hills of Tuscany.  And the butterfly thing – what was that all about?  Were we supposed to see the softer side of this killer?  From cold-blooded murderer to lepidoperist all in an afternoon.  He even had a butterfly tatttoo!

This isn’t going to be a long review, the movie was long enough or so it seemed.  And why did it seem that way? Because it practically felt that it was being shot in real time. It moved ever so slowly.  I thought it was too slow and then I thought maybe this was the way movies used to be made, you know with the long shots and no cuts and not made up of hundreds of sound bytes.  This question is still up in the air.

Basically we watch Clooney kill a few people, get shot at by a few people and see how he forms an ego-manical sexual liason with a prostitute.

Edward Clark, a/k/a Mister Butterfly to those  from whom he is hiding his real identity, is a loner, a man who turns to a whore for sexual solace and ends up caring for her (??) – that’s debatable since he was prepared to shoot her during their picnic.  He suspects everyone and well he should because this character is the perfect exemplification of the cliche:  What goes around comes around. He can trust no one – even his boss (?) tells him not to make friends.

Following a tried and true and time-worn story line;  we see the bad guy who wants to get out of the game and wants NOT to be alone anymore so he picks a woman definitely below his own intellect but one who either satisfies him sexually or feeds into his own lack of self-esteem so he doesn’t deserve any better – does this sound like Paul Newman in The Hustler?

Anyway Clooney’s fate is sealed-Hollywood does not want to send the message that is okay to kill people and get away with it.  They stopped doing that when they stopped making John Wayne and Gary Cooper westerns.