The Trouble With George Clooney's 2010 Film The American Is......I've Read The Book

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

As you know from my blog I read a lot of books. What you will rarely get here is a chat about films. I'm not a film buff. Of course I have favourites won't deny that but when I've control of the TV I'd rather as a rule watch the football (rugby,basketball etc).

And there is the subsection to that of films that are based on a book. Again normally I'd avoid them as it would spoil my enjoyment of the work it was based on. Reading a book after seeing a film would be like watching a recording of a football game whilst already knowing the result (in most cases,but I'll come back to that later). And If I've already read the book then to me what's the point of watching the film for exactly the same reason.

Of course occasionally the film is better than the sourced book. But in my experience only if the original was dull. The Guns Of Navarone as an entertainment is a perfectly good war film but the only near death experience I had when reading the Alistair Maclean thriller was to my brain as it was coma inducing (and for the record that's not an exception - I don't particularly like him).

All of this is leading to of course the recent exception to the above. Wife/daughter have been nagging me to do more in watching my recorded programmes on the DVR. It's about 14%  clear at time of writing. This is to be fair mainly due to recordings of football (rugby,basketball etc) as well as the Welsh language programmes such as the soap opera Pobol Y Cwm. So I've been making an extra effort to watch them. Which brings us to The American. A 2010 film starring George Clooney.

Now you may remember a while back after reading the original Martin Booth novel I said that when this film was next on TV I'd see it. This was partly out of curiosity and partly that I like watching films set in Tuscany as this is where my Italian relatives live. It came up on the DVR list and so started viewing .....I wish I hadn't.

The film starts with a gunfight in a frozen snow ridden part of Sweden. In the book a similar scene is the main character's bad memory somewhere around the middle and that was it. In the film it's the beginning and turns out to be part of the plot. In other words they were changing the storyline.

Personally it really angers me when they do that because if you hadn't read the book you'd have a wrong idea of Martin Booth's thriller. I first realised that film/TV could cheat like this when I was nine years old. There was a TV series in the early seventies of Black Beauty. Set in a Victorian country doctor's house the point was that for me as a nine year old it seemed to be a series for girls (the lead character other than the horse being the eldest child, a daughter) so I didn't watch it after the first few episodes.

About a year later I had the flu and as this was not even the age of the video recorder let alone the internet reluctantly picked a book from my great unread at that time which turned out to be somebody's unwanted copy of Anna Sewell's original novel. Well I was bowled over. Not only was it good it also had nothing to do other than have a black horse in it with the TV series that bore it's name. And incidentally it was also far tougher than I'd expected.

If you've read the book first you'll realise as a consequence that the main villain is not the same as the film. When you realise that it's not difficult working out who that is.

I mentioned  before in this blog falling asleep when trying to view the film for the first time. Well I understand why now. The novel slowly ratchets up the suspense with powerful intensity . The film is just slow and the occasional gunfight and naked female breasts cannot hide it's overall high boredom level.The most lively bit is at the end but I was just too numbed/annoyed to care.

George Clooney is the best thing in the film. In conveys the icy isolated main character impressively. However although he is the best thing in the movie he doesn't carry it.

I really should have known better.

Until the next time.