The whys and hows of Jack and his situation are never fully explained because they’re not important. Death is his business and therefore it’s understood his cover must be protected even at the price of his own soul. And so he leaves the country, covers his tracks (even from his handler), and travels to a quaint small town in Italy where he hopes to hide in plain sight from those lethal Swedes and complete the kind of job where, this time, he won’t have to pull the trigger. His new commission is to craft a particularly nasty tool of the trade for a female assassin as intriguing and unknowable as she is beautiful.

And yes, this will be Jack’s last job before he gets out for good. 

But you already knew that.

You would think a seasoned killer experienced enough to survive until his hair went gray would choose a better place to lie low than a small village where he conspicuously stands out – and then some — as the sole American. An aging, local priest fingers him as such immediately.  The only explanation for this counter-intuitive decision appears to be to satisfy the cinematographer, because the old-world setting nestled into a mountainside complete with winding cobblestone streets is truly lovely to look at.

Like Clooney’s soul-weary killer, the friendly and wizened priest is another well-worn archetype in this well-worn genre of last-job-before-I-get-out-forever assassin films. And soon you’ll add one more archetype, a breathtakingly beautiful hooker with a heart of gold who doesn’t look a moment hardened by her chosen profession and who, naturally, sees something worthwhile in Jack no one else does, including us. But these are archetypes for a reason, they work, and up to a certain point “The American,” through its own quiet rhythm and somber tone, also works.

Anyone looking for a thriller will be quickly disappointed. Director Anron Corbijn isn’t interested in action. At all. As a matter of fact, Jack’s pursuers are as easy to kill as red-shirted “Star Trek” crewmen. This is a mood and character piece experimenting with silence and stillness in the hopes of making large the small moments, movements and gestures that come from a character too emotionally isolated and permanently on guard to offer up anything else.  Chatter and exposition and back-story would only betray the essence of this character, which means that it’s up to Clooney fill in the pieces using only his screen presence. Thanks to his first truly outstanding and Oscar-worthy performance, Clooney not only accomplishes this, he also draws us in wanting to know more. Who is this man? What made him who he is?  Will he redeem himself?

Unfortunately, it’s here where the story finally collapses.

Okay, so there’s nothing cinematically subtle about a fallen man at a crossroads in his life and at the same time befriended by the extremes of priest and prostitute. But that doesn’t mean the idea at work there can’t be interesting. The problem is that like the rest of the thematic track you’re deceived into believing the film is laying, it’s all a cheat. Not a single thematic element goes anywhere or even attempts to assume any kind of meaning. Jack might be handsome, worldly and refined, but he also happens to be a sociopath. To root for him, to want Jack to become Edward and get out from under the sins of his past, we have to see something worthy of redemption.  But we don’t, and still the film roots for him, which is especially obvious in the melodramatic climax.

“The American” dares to burden itself (and us) with the heavy symbolism of priest, prostitute, and butterfly, not to mention Jack’s unforgivable crime, but then doesn’t have the courage to deliver on what it means – other than (snore) the futility of it all. This makes for a numbing third act and turns the hushed moments and clipped dialogue and lingering stares into something worse than pretense. Slowly, what once drew you in devolves into cold disappointment and watch-checking tedium — at least until the credits roll, at which point you’re completely numb.

No matter how good the acting, lovely the locations, pretty the cinematography or pregnant the pauses; no matter how much you might tart something up with the whiff of self-important existentialism, just as black is the absence of color, indifference is not a theme — it’s the absence of theme. Nihilism is not art. Nihilism is the absence of art. Which isn’t to say that this subdued and self-consciously quiet examination of the barren existence of an aging hit man tired of looking over his shoulder is without merit. What the film is without, however, is a point – which appears to be the point, which means that we have here is a deliberate act of artistic cowardice.

In an interview published today, The Atlantic describes Gore Vidal as “a sharp provocateur, as irascible and irreverent as ever.”

I’m assuming that’s some kind of internal Atlantic-code for ”twisted old has-been degenerate desperate for attention“:

ATLANTIC: In September, director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland for leaving the U.S. in 1978 before being sentenced to prison for raping a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in Hollywood. During the time of the original incident, you were working in the industry, and you and Polanski had a common friend in theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan. So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

VIDAL: I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Vidal then goes on to blame Polanski’s legal problems on…

“an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing …  The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, Polacko…”

Oh, it’s because Polanski’s Jewish… Now it all makes sense. We should’ve been looking at his being a Jew not his confession or his drugging and sodomizing a 13 year-old girl who obviously had it coming because she wasn’t wearing a communion dress.

Naturally Vidal will face no real outrage or consequence for describing a 13 year-old rape victim as a “hooker.”

He’s inoculated.

He’s a Leftist.