Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate spoiler special on The American, the new Anton Corbin film starring George Clooney. Here in the Slate studio with me is Mr. John Swansberg. Hi, John. Hey, good to be here. We haven't done a spoiler in a while. I know. It's good to be back. I'm very delighted to be doing this one with you in particular. And also, I want to apologize to listeners. There's some work being done in the building where our studio is. So you may hear some random rumblings and drillings in the background, which actually are sort of suitable to the movie we're talking about, given that there's a lot of machining.

Right.

Don't worry.

There are no assassins on our trail, as far as we know.

George Clooney's not sharpening a bullet in the background.

So the American, Anton Corbyn, all right, quick reaction, first of all. Was it

better than you expected, worse than you expected? I had to say I didn't really know what to

expect. I didn't know very much about this movie. I really liked it. Throughout the movie,

I kept thinking to myself, I'm really enjoying this. Maybe in part because there are long

stretches of this movie where you are invited to contemplate how you're feeling about the movie.

It's not the movie that I think either of us thought it was based on just the cursory knowledge of the movie that we had.

Is that right?

Yeah, I think that would be safe to say.

I mean, I hadn't actually watched the trailer and we were laughing because it basically takes the three action scenes from the movie and makes it look like the whole movie is this super tense,

suspenseful shoot them up.

Right. And which would be a natural thing to expect anyway from a late summer George Clooney

spy release, right? You were sort of expecting something noisy and fun and possibly good,

possibly not. The last thing I would have thought was that it would be this incredibly

spare,

austere, almost silent. It felt at times sort of like an Antonioni movie or something. I mean,

I don't think it had those kind of artistic ambitions, nor did it achieve them if it did have them,

but it had that kind of empty space. Right. There's a lot of long shots of the architecture of the small Italian village where Clooney is living

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