American Star

American Star

“American Star” is an art-house take on the old hitman story. Set in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, which is just Gobsmackingly beautiful, it takes a soft-spoken, slowed-down contemplative approach to the material, omits things whenever it can, rarely shows any situation in the usual way and anchors itself to a lead performance by Ian McShane that’s a perfect example of how you take a reactive character who sometimes doesn’t say anything and make his thoughts and feelings legible to the viewer it’s all in the face, especially the eyes; there are several long close-ups here where you feel every emotion as it crosses his face.

What is this movie about? I’ve seen “American Star” twice now and I’m still not totally sure partly because director Gonzalo López-Gallego (who also edited) and screenwriter Nacho Faerna go long stretches without dropping bits of exposition; but mainly because this is one of those movies where look-and sound and overall energy wise it’s “about” something, not so much any obviously spelled-out theme.

It begins with Wilson arriving in Fuerteventura: picking up a rental car, going to a modernist house out in the desert (presumably where his target is), but nobody’s home; he leaves when he sees a young woman (Nora Arnezeder). He goes into town; he’s staying at a luxury hotel behaves like a man on vacation (“I am,” he tells people who him ask why he’s there); sees some live music (including a couple performers in a hotel lounge doing an acoustic cover of Europe’s “Final Countdown”) gets to know locals/workers/fellow resort guests, including [a] young boy (Oscar Coleman) who sits on floor outside door while parents argue inside. Goes out for drink and meets same woman he saw at house, a bartender named Gloria. Gloria will take a liking to Wilson and even bring him home to meet her mother (Fanny Ardant).

Wilson and Gloria don’t have the kind of relationship you think. When you find out what sort of relationship they’re building, it deepens Wilson, and opens up surprising aspects of Gloria’s character as well. This is a movie about waiting not just for his target to arrive on Fuerteventura. We don’t know how old Wilson is but McShane is 81, and there’s dialogue about his character having served in the Falklands war, which happened in 1982: we get the sense that he was no spring chicken even then.

But whatever his official vintage, he’s an older man waiting on his end; the road behind him is longer than the road ahead. The title refers to a wrecked ship off the coast of the island hearing its backstory, Wilson realizes it’s only slightly older than he is. The movie presents that ship as a seemingly immovable object that’s more fragile than it appears.

Typically, the noir genre is fatalistic; characters are going in one direction and their efforts to avoid the crash just make the inevitable crash worse. Eventually “American Star” moves out of European art house mode and into a film noir groove, giving the project an unexpectedly acidic aftertaste that contrasts with the beguiling gentleness sometimes even wonderment of much of the story that has come before.

The worm begins to turn when Wilson encounters Ryan (Adam Nagaitis), a hitman who is also the son of a former platoon-mate. He seems at times like he’s there to keep Wilson on track, or kill him after he finishes with the target; we aren’t sure what his deal is, but he’s an arrogant yet weirdly likable guy until he crosses a line with Wilson and you hate him; then things pivot again, as they do in this movie, and you see him as a self-deluded pitiable creature intoxicated by his own invulnerability, maybe as Wilson himself was back in the day.

López-Gallego appears to be one of those rare actor-director duos with McShane (they also collaborated on 2012’s “The Hollow Point”). You can feel McShane’s natural charisma emanating from Wilson in the later scenes where he opens up to the kid and Gloria’s mom. He has a great laugh, and when you hear it, you might wonder what life Wilson gave up in order to have this one, which requires him to skulk around remote locations in a black suit with a gun in his pocket waiting to kill someone he’s never met. But mostly, this is a performance in the mode of tough-guy characters played by actors like Alain Delon or Clint Eastwood, who made the audience come to them.

A character actor for six decades who became a star in his sixties by playing lethal charmers in a string of edgy, brutal films and TV series (“Sexy Beast,” “Deadwood,” “John Wick,” “American Gods”), McShane is also there’s no other way to put it of the Sixties (and the Seventies), meaning that he prefers to act in projects full of characters who aren’t coded exclusively as good or bad, and where the storytelling leaves room for viewers to think about or argue over what was meant or intended. “American Star” very much fits that bill.

Lovers of art-house crime flicks may be reminded of well-regarded retro-minded entries from recent decades such as “The American,” starring George Clooney as a hitman who gets a new lease on life while on assignment but too late to redeem himself; and Stephen Frears’ Terence Stamp vehicle “The Limey,” which like this film has a main character named Wilson.

There may be only so much that can be done with the story tropes this type of film has chosen at this point, and it may be that the existential hitman doing one last job subgenre has been played out at the plot level for a long time, and can only be repackaged, not reinvented (sort of like the “one last job” Westerns that it descended from).

But this is an unusually intelligent and purposeful movie that doesn’t say much but feels a lot. López-Gallego has a dancer’s sense of rhythm and movement, never changing screen direction or cutting or shifting to another type of shot when you expect him to, but always choosing his moments according to his own peculiar sense of when the timing is right. McShane gives him a center of gravity. It’s to the star’s credit that, as sinuously confident as the directing and editing always are, some of the most memorable scenes are built around long closeups of McShane’s face.

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