The American

[wilder]

Definitely was trying to be something in the vein of The Passenger. I really wanted to like it, but in the end it pales in comparison to Antonioni's movie without really offering anything new...and comes off more as that movie's ghost than a worthy successor. This is the problem with filmmakers attempting to create merely updated versions of a past success. The shooting style of The American is sparse and cold, but clearly through the eyes of someone not creating the reality of the movie as they personally see it, but shooting in attempt to capture the vision of a filmmaker who isn't them. Ultimately Corbjin's movie feels like a clinical exercise rather than something genuine and this is where I feel it fails. In contrast, a movie like Black Swan synthesizes past tropes to create something of a mutation that hasn't been seen before, even if its ideas can be found in other movies, and so feels fresh. I can't knock Corbjin for trying and Clooney is a good cast in the role but at the end of the day it wasn't really special.

[Gold Trumpet]

It's a shame anything nice is ever said about Antonioni's The Passenger. I still resent that movie for how much it simplified a great style and I resent the comments which lump it with every other great Antonioni movie like they are all one and the same.

[wilder]

I like The Passenger a lot, maybe mostly for its photography, but also for its suggestion of crime movie elements in a story largely not about that. It's also fun to see a foreign filmmaker doing his thing with a major American actor and seeing how he attempts to communicate his ideas in a slightly more mainstream way. It's no La Notte but trying to compare those two is a bit like comparing apples to oranges.

Regardless of being "major" or "minor" Antonioni, it's still 'real' Antonioni in the sense that it came straight from his brain and wasn't an attempt to emulate someone else's style, which is the important thing in the context of what I was trying to say.

[Gold Trumpet]

Well, I don't know what "real" Antonioni means. Even if he loved the film, the filmmaking is very subpar shooting for him. When he transitioned out of Italy and made his first film in England with Blow Up, he showed his style did not have to be measured back to film a story outside of his Italian themed subject of soullessness in modern society. I understand Antonioni maybe wanting to change and switch up his filmmaking, but throughout his career (Passenger included), he been attracted to stories about modern lifelessness. Why deaden his filmmaking focus by doing something which was so basic for him? All the stylistic choices in the film just imitate his old style. It's not good.

The shame is that the end moments in the Passenger prove he was still capable of great filmmaking. The film completely reverses to a shot out of his older films and it's masterful, but it's just the last shot. It felt like an obligatory call back to his great style to remind his fans he could still do it if he wanted to, but he just chose not to. There are defenders of this style change, but I wonder, how does it improve upon the film more than his previous style? Even if it would have been a continuation, focusing on the old style would have made for a better film.

[wilder]

I can't argue with your preference for his movies that were trying to reach bounds he hadn't explored before over than the ones that were treading familiar territory. By 'real Antonioni' I mean exactly what I said above, in that The Passenger was shot with the intention of communicating the personal (original) worldview of the filmmaker who made it, rather than being an attempt to copy someone else's style and thereby losing the soul of that style in the process. You may still think The Passenger lacks soul compared to Antonioni's other works, but in relation to The American it has a hell of a lot more.

Soul isn't even the right word. Right this second I can't think of a better one.

[Gold Trumpet]

Fair points. There are filmmakers I know who lessened their degrees of filmmaking but even their lesser work looked like great stuff compared to what was being made after. Objective arguments can hang in the balance of subjective viewing of other stuff. Definitely happens.

[Stefen]

I love when conversations like this are happening. I don't have the intellect or the know about it to ever engage in a talk about film like this, but I always enjoy it when reading others do it. 

[Pas]

Hahaha same feeling here Stefen

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i think a lot about The American these days, how it totally failed at being great while being always so near at all times. Often when a movie doesn't work it's pretty easy to know the problem but here, no idea. There's one, but i can't see it.

[matt35mm]

I finally finished watching this last night (it took me three nights over the course of a week). Except for the immediate reaction of being bored, I went back and forth on how I felt about it. It does feature really pretty cinematography, and that ridiculously beautiful woman (who was unfortunately used in what is probably the most cliched role in storytelling history). I realized after a while that everything I liked about it was the kind of stuff that you can see in car commercials.

I wasn't bored because of the slow pace. I actually liked the pacing of it; I just didn't care about anything that was going on. One reason might be because I don't really care for westerns and this movie was basically just a western in sleek clothing. Everything was incredibly obvious. The fact that the story has Clooney's only two meaningful human interactions be with a PRIEST and a HOOKER shows how on the nose it all is, while carrying this weird pretense of subtlety that I couldn't take seriously.

Comparisons to Antonioni/The Passenger are superficial, and the word "existential" does not accurately apply to any aspect of this film. I only mention those two things because they're being used in a lot of reviews of this film, and I can't help but feel like people are seeing things in the movie that are just not there.

And it's not that there's nothing there. It's not a meaningless movie. It's just that most of what's there is trite and obvious. Hollow. The film wears its themes on its sleeve, but kind of holds onto them for the sake of a sense of weight or profundity, without ever really being interested in actually delving into any of it.

I think there were some criticisms of the movie saying that there wasn't enough action or enough stuff going on, but I completely disagree. I think there was way too much going on, which killed the "meditative" quality of the movie for me. Every time I got close to any sort of meditative state, the movie got sucked into the worst of the genre's conventions and handled them with total mediocrity. The villain also really sucked--everything he said was copied and pasted from another movie.

And "Mister Butterfly?" WHAT!

This is one of those movies that I like less the more I think about it.