Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

* * *
Director: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Channing Tatum, Alden Ehrenreich, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton

Good news and bad news. The good news is that Hail, Caesar!, which finds the Coen brothers in a loosey goosey kind of mood, is a treat for movie nerds, it's such an affectionately crafted paean to 1950s Hollywood and the moment when the old Hollywood started to fall away and make room for the new. The bad news is that, once you see it, you'll find yourself longing for full length versions of the Coen brothers' take on the Esther Williams swim and song movie, the singing cowboy B-movie, the swords and sandals biblical epic, and the Gene Kelly song and dance movie. Hail, Caesar is more a series of fun vignettes than anything, but when it's this entertaining it hardly matters that the plot is all dangling threads held together by the vague notion that the protagonist is experiencing a dark night of the soul.

Review: Intolerable Cruelty (2003)

* * *
Director: Joel & Ethan Coen
Starring: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones

In the grand pantheon of Coen brothers movies, Intolerable Cruelty, their one foray into romantic comedy, often gets dismissed as being among the least of their works. To be sure, it lacks the staying power and importance of their very best work, but I've always had a certain degree of affection for it. It's a silly movie, but it also has an old school battle of the sexes vibe and I can easily imagine it, with a few tweaks for period sensibility, as a comedy from Hollywood's golden age, maybe with Cary Grant in the George Clooney role and Lauren Bacall in the Catherine Zeta-Jones role. Intolerable Cruelty is arguably the fluffiest movie the Coens have made to date, but it's a lot of fun in its lightness and inconsequentiality.

Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman

Fantastic Mr. Fox so perfectly exemplifies Wes Anderson's storytelling and visual style that it's amazing that it took him 5 films to get there. Adapted from the children's book by Roald Dahl, the film allows Anderson to indulge in both the homemade aesthetic that typically informs his work as well as the thematic concern over relationships between sons and father (or father figures) which comes up time and again in his films. Funny, charming, and beautifully rendered, Fantastic Mr. Fox is easily one of Anderson's best films - and I say that as someone whose feelings about pretty much all of his films are positive.

Review: The Monuments Men (2014)

* * *
Director: George Clooney
Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Cate Blanchett

Had The Monuments Men been released in December as planned I probably would have found myself massively disappointed by it, as the annual year end glut of great and would-be great movies tends to set expectations fairly high. But with the film pushed out of the prestige period and into the cinematic no-man's land that is February, accompanied by reviews that can best be described as "tepid," my expectations were naturally and appropriately lowered, and as a result I found the film rather enjoyable. That's not to say that it's without its flaws - they're there and they're fairly prominent - but I think that The Monuments Men is better than its reputation suggests.

Review: Gravity (2013)

* * * *
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

I don't like 3D. I've said so before and I'm saying it again, and the reason I don't like it is because 99% of the films released in that format have absolutely no business being 3D, their sole purpose in using the technology being to pad box office receipts. Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity is a film that belongs in the 1%, a masterwork that uses the technology as it should be used, creating new cinematic vistas and giving the audience something it's never seen before. But the film is not just a technological achievement. It has a strong, well-told story, great performances, and thematic depth that will make it compelling in 2D as well but, man, do yourself a favor and see it at least once in 3D.

Review: The Descendants (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: Alexander Payne
Starring: George Clooney

Alexander Payne is an expert at finding comedy in unlikely places. His debut feature, Citizen Ruth, was about the battle over the legality of abortion, About Schmidt was about a recent widower and retiree who fears that life is meaningless and futile, Sideways is about a failed and alcoholic writer, and his masterpiece Election is about the epic battle between a frustrated high school teacher and a manipulative, over-achieving student. His latest, The Descendants is about, amongst other things, the process of grief and like his previous films mixes comedy and drama so seamlessly that he makes it look deceptively easy.

Review: The Ides of March (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: George Clooney
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, George Clooney, Evan Rachel Wood, Marissa Tomei

"Because how one ought to live is so far removed from how one lives that he who lets go of what is done for that which one ought to do sooner learns ruin than his own preservation: because a man who might want to make a show of goodness in all things necessarily comes to ruin among so many who are not good. Because of this it is necessary for a prince, wanting to maintain himself, to learn how to be able to be not good and to use this and not use it according to necessity."
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Review: Three Kings (1999)

* * * *
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube

1999 was a great year in film. It was the year of Fight Club, The Matrix, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty and Boys Don't Cry, just to name a few. These movies were great in 1999 and they all hold up really well today, though none feel quite as prescient as David O. Russell's Three Kings. Set during the First Gulf War, the film tackles subject matter that is arguably more relevant now than ever, as if Russell (who wrote the screenplay in addition to directing) anticipated the issues that would dominate the last decade of political discourse.

Review: The American (2010)

* * * *
Director: Anton Corbijn
Starring: George Clooney

Patience. Precision. Craftsmanship. All are words that could describe The American both in terms of form and content. It is a slow movie and quiet, which won't appeal to everyone, but it's beautifully shot and well-acted so hopefully audiences will give it a chance because it definitely deserves to be seen. Anton Corbijn's old school style thriller, based on a novel by Martin Booth, is a perfect way to kick off the fall movie season.

George Clooney stars as Jack, or possibly Edward, an assassin who finds that he himself has become the target. He flees to Rome to discuss the situation with his boss, Pavel (Johan Leysen), and is sent to a small village to wait things out. After a quick look around, Jack opts for a different village and tosses the cell phone Pavel has provided for him - even his allies can't be trusted in a time like this. Jack keeps in touch with Pavel through payphones, which is how he ends up with a new assignment, one which he later decides will be his last.

He meets with a woman named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) and then gets to work on a custom-made gun according to her instructions. Most of his time is spent on the assignment and in dodging people he's certain are out to kill him, but he also has time to make connections with people in the village. One is the local priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who recognizes Jack as a man with a troubled soul and reaches out to him, one sinner to another. The other is Clara (Violante Placido), a prostitute with whom Jack gradually develops a relationship, even though the events of the film's opening moments have taught him how dangerous such connections can be.

We know, due to the benefit of storytelling logic, that either Mathilde or Clara will ultimately betray Jack. It is to the film's credit that it keeps us guessing who it will be as long as it does. There are two scenes that take place in a secluded area by a lake - one with Mathilde, the other with Clara - that are so fraught with tension that all you can do is hold your breath and wait for the boom to drop. The American is a film built on that kind of tension, making you wait for the payoff. An argument could be made, I suppose, that "nothing" happens in this movie, but I would have to respectfully disagree. It's a cerebral and very interior story but there is a narrative progression that is taking place and I found it totally engrossing.

Corbijn, who began his career as a photographer, has a fantastic eye for composing shots and that, in conjunction with the cinematography of Martin Ruhe and the fact that the location itself is stunning, makes this one of the most beautiful looking films I've seen in quite a while. The American is Corbijn's second film, his first being Control, a biopic of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. I was pretty keen on Control, too, so I can't wait to see where Corbijn goes from here. He's a great director in terms of style while at the same time he doesn't let style overwhelm the content of the story.

As for Clooney, his performance here is probably the best I've ever seen from him. Like the film itself, the performance is very quiet and Clooney has to suggest a lot more than he ultimately reveals. I don't know that we ever truly get to "know" Jack, but I found Clooney to be very effective in the role, articulating a great deal through little more than subtle shifts in his expression. I don't know that The American is high profile enough to get Clooney much attention from the awarding groups at the end of the year, but he'd definitely deserve it.

Review: The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009)

* *
Director: Grant Heslov
Starring: Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges

Why do I get the feeling that the genesis of this film started with the idea to cast Ewan McGregor and then progressed to a bunch of meta Jedi jokes and then progressed to a story? I really wanted to like The Men Who Stare At Goats and given the caliber of its cast, I had pretty high expectations. Unfortunately, I found it really half baked and shapeless and a waste of the assembled talent.

The film centers on Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who is despondent following the break down of his marriage and goes to the Middle East in an attempt to prove to his wife that he's a man to be taken seriously. While waiting for clearance to go into Iraq he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of a special branch of the U.S. military whose mission was to harness paranormal forces in order to help usher world peace. Lyn's legend as one of the most powerful New World Jedis is already well known to Bob, though he remains skeptical of Lyn's actual abilities.

When he learns that Lyn is going into Iraq, Bob talks his way into coming along and soon finds himself in way over his head. He and Lyn essentially stumble from one bad situation to another, getting kidnapped by locals, getting caught in the middle of a firefight between two U.S. security teams (each of whom thinks they're being fired on by insurgents), getting lost in the desert, and so on until they discover what all of the New World Army experimentation has finally come to.

The film starts out fairly strong - lightweight, to be sure, but charming in its eccentricities. Though McGregor's accent is often suspect, I think he nails the general essence of the character and he makes a decent straight man for all the wacky guys who surround him. Of these wacky guys, none is more so than Clooney (though Jeff Bridges, starring as the leader of the New World Army, gives him a run for his money). Generally speaking, when Clooney does a straight up comedy character I find that he goes way too broad and relies too much on a particular set of facial ticks and mannerisms, but since a character like Lyn calls for broadness in the performance, it ends up working well with Clooney's comedic instincts. All in all, whatever problems the film has really aren't rooted in the cast, which also includes Kevin Spacey in a deliciously subdued role as a rogue Jedi gone over to the darkside. The cast is fine; it's the screenplay that really sinks this whole enterprise.

Though it has its moments, The Men Who Stare At Goats plays out like a product from the poor man's Coen brothers. The humor is there - though, to be honest, it really is just the same couple of jokes over and over, which gets tedious - but the structure is not. The movie never really seems to know where it's going or what, exactly, it wants to do once it gets there. It makes a few half hearted attempts to comment on the powder keg of competing interests in Iraq, but it really doesn't have anything to say about the situation that hasn't already been said, and better, by many others over the past few years. I don't think The Men Who Stare At Goats is a truly bad movie, but I do think putting the screenplay through a couple more drafts and tightening things up would have served it well.

Review: Up In The Air (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick

Only connect - E.M. Forster

(See what I did there? Because Up In The Air is about a guy who avoids close relationships and spends most of his life in airports, so it has a double meaning. Yeah, I’m pretty clever. But enough about me...)

Our hero in this adventure is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a genial guy who flies around the United States firing people for a living. To most people that might sound like a depressing (perhaps even somewhat evil) occupation, but Ryan loves what he does because it allows him the freedom to exist without strings, to never be in one place long enough to become encumbered by the obligations of a genuine relationship, be it romantic or otherwise. In the current economic climate business is booming but that doesn’t mean that the company has stopped trying to find ways to trim the fat and it looks as if Ryan and the other field agents are about to become casualties of technology, destined for desk jobs in which they perform their duties over the computer. The person behind this plan of action is Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a college grad with all the answers and none of the experience. In an effort to preserve his way of life, Ryan challenges her to get some experience in the field before overhauling the business and the two set out on the road together.

The other woman in Ryan’s life is Alex (Vera Farmiga), with whom he has a casual relationship that is dependent on overlaps in their hectic, cross-country schedules. While Natalie is a young idealist who believes that she can make her life unfold according to her schedule, Alex is a little more cynical, a lot more like Ryan. “Think of me as you with a vagina,” she tells him at one point, much to his delight. Ryan and Alex have a lot of fun together, but their lifestyles ensure that they can never be more than just ships passing in the night – until, of course, it becomes more than that, though not necessarily for both.

The screenplay by Jason Reitman (who also directs) and Sheldon Turner is sharp and funny, particularly in the scenes between Ryan and Natalie. While Ryan readily takes Natalie under his wing so that he may impart the wisdom of his ways to her, she’s reluctant to take him seriously and she subtly picks away at his personal ideology of travelling light. Watching Clooney and Kendrick play off of each other is a delight, particularly the way that she tends to cut their conversations off at the knees, rendering him speechless but giving him the opportunity to make faces of bemused exasperation. Clooney’s rapport with Farmiga is also excellent and their first scene together crackles with a relaxed sexiness. Ryan and Alex get each other and theirs is very much a relationship of equals, which is refreshing. The way that their relationship resolves itself is a bit weak, but the strength of everything leading up to that makes it easy to forgive.

Clooney’s performance in this film has been called the best of his career and I think that’s a fairly accurate assessment. Ryan could easily be a stereotypical man-child, running from commitment at every turn, always moving in order to avoid having to acknowledge the void inside him; but Clooney takes this as a starting point and then actually builds on it to create a full-bodied character. There’s a scene where Ryan tries to soften the blow of a firing by telling a man that rather than disappointing his children by losing his job, he can gain their admiration by pursuing his original passion as a chef, stating that the reason children admire athletes is because they follow their dreams. Later Ryan returns to his hometown with Alex and shows her photos of his days as a high school basketball star - I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s a lot of subtlety in the way that he wistfully confronts his past and it becomes clear that one of the reasons he can do what he does is because he sees himself in the people he’s firing. He’s doing for them what he can’t do for himself by freeing them from the corporate drudgery that may bring in money but won’t bring fulfilment – though that probably wouldn’t be much comfort to someone whose been at the same job for decades and doesn’t know how they’ll pay their mortgage.

I liked Up In The Air a lot, but I don’t really get the massive critical fuss over it. With its focus on the current economic crisis and use of real people who have lost their jobs in the firing scenes it wants very much to be relevant and meaningful, but it doesn’t run quite as deep as it’s playing at. At one point Ryan explains that in his business you sell one thing and do another and that’s kind of what the movie is doing, too. It’s a slick bit of business, selling the audience on the idea that it’s about the little people, the common man struggling to stay above water, but really it’s just using these people as props for its far more ordinary plotline about a lost man finding his way. It’s still a very good movie, but it is performing a narrative sleight of hand.

Review: The Good German (2006)

* *
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Toby Maguire

They don’t make movies the way they used to… and maybe they shouldn’t try. The Good German is designed as a throwback to classic cinema, marketed to draw comparisons to Casablanca, though it has much more in common with The Third Man. It’s an interesting film, but an interesting failure. It looks fantastic and the story in its bare outlines is intriguing, but the film just ultimately doesn’t pull it off.

The setting is Berlin in the days just after the end of World War II when the various Allied interests meet to decide the new boundaries of Europe. Into this comes Jake Geismer (George Clooney), an army journalist set to cover the story, who barely has time to set foot in Berlin before his driver, Tully (Toby Maguire), lifts his wallet. Tully's a shady character who loves the anything goes attitude of post-war Berlin and is deeply involved in the black market. He's also deeply involved with a German woman named Lena (Cate Blanchett), ostensibly as her boyfriend, though occassionally he acts as her pimp. When he learns that Lena’s husband, Emil – whom she insists is dead – is a valuable commodity due to the job he held with the Nazis during the war, he decides to make a deal with the Russians to hand him over, theorizing that he can get himself and Lena to London before they realize that he never had Emil in the first place. The next morning Tully shows up dead in a river with a great deal of cash strapped to his belt.

Geismer is suspicious of the circumstances surrounding Tully’s death, particularly the fact that Tully was his driver and was involved with Lena, who was Geismer’s girlfriend during an earlier stay in Berlin. Lena is close-lipped about everything to Geismer and wants only for him to go away, but he wants to help her and if he does go away, he intends to take her with him. His investigation puts him at odds with his superior officers, who want Tully’s murder to quietly go away so that they can get on with more serious business, and puts Lena in even greater danger. Also in danger is Emil, whom Lena has been hiding. He is the good German of the title and has information that he wants to hand over to the Americans. Lena helps him because he’s her husband, but also because by doing so she hopes to atone for her own actions during the war – a secret which is revealed only in the film’s final scene.

Director Steven Soderbergh achieves the 1940s look by filming in black and white with period lenses on the cameras. Shots are composed in the classic style and filmed entirely on studio back lots rather than on location. Visually, the film more than achieves its goal. The problems arise when you get beyond that surface element because aside from the visual aesthetic, the film doesn't adhere to the sensibilities and restrictions of the 1940s. The dialogue is thoroughly modern and so is the direct treatment of sex and sexuality. You never heard Bogart say “fuck” and what happened behind closed bedroom doors was left to the imagination – not so here. This uneasy mixing of the modern and the classic makes the film seem indecisive, like it kind of wants to be a 40s movie, but at the same time it kind of doesn’t.

Furthermore, while the elements of the plot are intriguing, the characters are ultimately underdevelopped and the actors seem out of place in the setting. Clooney and Maguire, in particular, have acting styles that are very modern and don't really mesh with the style of filming. If The Good German had been made without the gimmick, I don't doubt that they could have made their characters work but as it is, the performances just don't seem authentic and come off as pale imitation. The only exception is Blanchett, who is able to effectively evoke Dietrich and rise above the narrowness of her character. Played by Blanchett, Lena fits the setting and is rewarded by getting the only line that really stands out: “An affair has more rules than a marriage.”

The Good German is a difficult film to dislike because for all its faults, at least it's trying to do something and it's taking chances. I admire it for what it wants to do, but find that it falls far short of its objective.