Endangered 2010: The American

Anton CORBIJN

Now that my two favorite films of 2010 (Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me and the Joosts’ Catfish) have officially been eliminated from Oscar contention, my rooting interest in the awards ceremony is entirely invested in hoping that Inception is barred from receiving anything other than technical awards. Christopher Nolan, in a bald attempt to build an “original” film, decided consciously to avoid the influence of others in what must be considered one of the greatest acts of directorial conceit in recent history. When asked what kind of research he did for Inception, he replied:

I don’t actually tend to do a lot of research when I’m writing. I took the approach in writing Inception that I did when I was writing Memento, about memory and memory loss, which is I tend to examine my own process of, in this case dreaming and in Memento’s case, memory, and try and analyze how that works and how that might be changed or manipulated; how a rule set might emerge from my own process and I do that because I think a lot of what I find, you wind up doing with research. (link)

Nolan, essentially, confused his own perception of reality with the universal case, and assumed that “ten years” of reading his dream journal would produce the exact same effects as roughly 2500 years of insight into human psychology. While other directors haven’t had the lack of self-awareness or balls to take their utter indifference to history to Nolan-like levels, there has been an unfortunate trend towards choosing “originality” over quality. (For more context, take a look at my post on the trend of charging Black Swan with being the same film as Showgirls.) In essence, the ability to charge a film with being too similar to a previous film has become a populist trope, and an easy way to discredit work that is never judged on its own merits. There is, here, a chicken-and-egg argument to make over whether or not the pressure of public outcry against imitative filmmaking influences directors like Nolan, or whether Nolan’s pretensions give agency to the public’s unbalanced critiques. Either way, people who love movies lose.

This is why Anton Corbijn’s film, The American, was so refreshing: precisely because it wasn’t afraid to learn the lessons one hundred and sixteen years of filmmaking has taught. By paying strict attention to the conventions of past noir and suspense films, Corbijn created a new film that is surprisingly enjoyable and practically seamless. What The American illuminates most is the complicated relationship between film and its genres. Take a look at this review of the film, which starts with the line, “The story is startlingly clichéd yet told in a pretentious and ponderous art-house style.” The pejorative connotations of the word formulaic make it hard to remember that formulas develop for a reason: they work. The “clichéd” story and “pretentious and ponderous art-house style” are not valid reasons to dislike the film; they are simply the rich inheritance that film history provides us. Corbijn deserves credit for having the courage to make a genre film in a climate that calls for endless appeals for needless “original” experimentation.

Let us look, for context’s sake, at the following two screen shots. The first is from Corbijn’s film, the second is from Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1956 film Bob le Flambeur.

Note the similarity in framing: both characters are confined to the far right of the frame. Both are aware, at the respective points in the two films, that they are being followed. Both directors create suspense by coupling what the hero sees (Roger Duchesne and George Clooney both look apprehensively past the camera) with what the audience can see (down the staircase past the armed guards in Bob le Flambeur, and out the café window into the streets in The American). The possibility of us, the audience, seeing the threat to the hero before he can creates the dramatic irony that holds us in suspense. Corbijn has learned the lessons that Melville has taught.

Now look again at the two frames and notice that Corbijn has, without a doubt, added a third element to his frame that Melville’s lacks. Namely, the reflection in the window behind Clooney is distinguishable from the darkness outside. The audience can, therefore, keep an eye both on what is outside the hero’s vision and what it is he is examining. This subtle but very important twist is the kind of original thought that is most effective in film (and other art, for that matter): the type that departs from its model only slightly, using the established formal material as a platform on which to build unexpected tangents. This is the lesson I wish filmmakers like Nolan would learn, that—as Jazz legend Charles Mingus once said—“you can’t improvise on nothing, man, you’ve got to improvise on something.”

The fact that The American owes a bulk of its success to films like Bob le Flambeur, Notorious, The Big Sleep, and Rififi doesn’t make it any less an impressive and engaging film. The fact that it tells a story that we’ve heard before in a familiar way is, actually, its strongest asset. 

• 1 year ago

• Endangered 2010
• Cutemeat Review

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