George Clooney wears an Omega Speedmaster

Anton Corbijn directed The American (2010), a slow, near-silent thriller about an assassin hiding out in the hill towns of Abruzzo. George Clooney plays Jack, a man who builds things with his hands and trusts almost no one. After he is hunted down and exposed at a winter lodge in Sweden, he is sent to Italy to lie low and take one last commission: not a killing, but a gun. He is to build a custom weapon for another assassin, Mathilde, something he describes as "a weapon with the capacity of a submachine gun and the range of a rifle." While he waits, he befriends the village priest, who nicknames him Mr Butterfly, and falls for a woman named Clara. Corbijn, a photographer before he was a director, shoots all of it like a 1970s character study: long silences, narrow streets, and a camera that lingers.

On Jack's wrist is an Omega Speedmaster Professional, the hand-wound Moonwatch powered by the caliber 1861, worn on a black leather strap with a deployant clasp rather than the usual steel bracelet. It is the right object for a man like this. The Speedmaster is a chronograph, a watch built to be operated and not just read, and Jack lives by precision. The film knows it. The watch is on screen almost the entire movie, and at the midpoint it earns a close-up so clean it could be an Omega advertisement: he presses the pusher to time Mathilde's progress with the weapon he has built. A dress watch could not have done that.

There is one more reason it fits. The Speedmaster is the watch NASA qualified for spaceflight and the one astronauts wore on the Moon, and Clooney is enough of a space enthusiast that he later appeared in an Omega short film with the Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The film never explains why Jack owns this watch, and it doesn't need to. A man this exacting, who builds a weapon by hand and then times it to the second, does not need a reason to wear a chronograph.