“I’m no good with machines.” That’s the line Jack (George Clooney) deploys early in the film before we see through the flimsy charade and know that, in fact, he is incredible with machines. Even his behavior is machine-like, processing the tools and materials in front of him into a finished product; he treats people the same way.

He’s a gunsmith and hitman, two skills which define The American in equal measure. Adapted by Rowan Joffe from the Martin Booth novel A Very Private Gentleman (and directed by music video veteran Anton Corbijn), the film is precise like clockwork, drawing on the bloodless, almost alien quality of machinery to tell its story. In this way it resembles Corbijn’ s feature debut Control, a biopic about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. That story set in the post-punk music scene could have been a raucous, fragmented explosion of a film, but instead was a black-and-white portrait of focused alienation and the probing of psychic wounds transformed into art.

The American contains all the features that would result in a sleek and sexy spy thriller: gorgeous women and exotic vistas, gun battles and clashes against a conspiracy. But instead the film finds the space between all those elements, and pulls from the tradition of the revisionist Western (the film channels Leone in its sentiment, even quoting Once Upon a Time in the West) to construct an engine of fatalism; its gears grind towards an inescapable conflict.

After a bloody opening gambit in the snowy wastelands of Sweden that recalls The Spy Who Loved Me (except James Bond didn’t shoot his woman in the back), Jack is forced to lay low in rural Italy. He’s dependent on his handler Pavel (Johan Leysen) as his lifeline to the outside world; Pavel sets him up with a new job that seems simple enough while the Swedes lose the trail — except it’s not, and they don’t. As Jack works on building a custom rifle for enigmatic assassin Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), his tension and paranoia reach a breaking point.

In my entry for Blue Valentine (#41) I mentioned The American as one of the films implicated in The Great Cinematic Cunnilingus Controversy of 2010. That act is featured as Jack has sex with prostitute Clara (Violante Placido), a collision between two people who deal with the primal forces of sex and death. They want to believe that those forces are controlled and restricted by the clinical exchange of money — Jack tells Clara, “I came here to get pleasure, not to give it” – but that kind of control is out of their reach.  The sex scene (cunnilingus included) is energetic, but what does it say that Jack’s interactions with Mathilde are, in their own way, more erotically charged? In a secluded little forest, Jack’s the one who must satisfy a client. Her hands dance as she assembles his precision-crafted rifle, and she displays a mixture of trust and bravado as she asks him to prove his worth and shoot near her without hitting her.

In both those scenes, The American unmasks the cinema’s intimate connection with sex and death. The film camera, like the rifle, is a mechanized product of industrial technology that controls and organizes the world. Film cameras, like rifles, are loaded with magazines; lenses are the components by which both machines find their accuracy in making their marks on reality. They require great technical skill and training to use effectively, but in the end, you point and shoot and capture — what you see through the lens is what you can control. And as The American displays on multiple levels, one can describe the history of cinema as a history of shooting women’s faces.

(The Film School Thesis Statement Generator says: “The use of mise-en-scene in The American masks Bergman-esque assertions of the nature of humanity.” In a strange way, the film could be said to position Leone and Bergman as counterparts…)