George Clooney (11 page)

Exact responsibility for precise parts of the script remains a little ambiguous. Reitman initially claimed sole credit but the Writer's Guild of America awarded shared credit with Sheldon Turner, who wrote an earlier draft (apparently unknown to Reitman at the time). Reitman began work on the project before
Thank You for Smoking
(2005) and
Juno
(2007), initially conceiving the narrative as more of an overt
comedy, but following the global financial crisis altered the tone significantly, giving some elements almost a documentary feel. Reitman persuaded his father, fellow director Ivan Reitman, to gain the rights to Kirn's novel, and with his father as producer, Ted and Nicholas Griffin were commissioned to produce a script, which was then worked on further by Reitman (Jason).

It is the first time that Clooney's name alone stands at the top of the billing, and along with
The American
(Anton Corbijn, 2010), it represents a further step in Clooney's stature within the industry. He still makes (and possibly prefers) ensemble pieces, but he is now able to carry a film narrative that sits very much on his shoulders.

Despite a cinematic image based largely on the notion of the romantic hero, it is striking how rarely Clooney post-1996 has actually played such a role. Only in
One Fine Day
(and as a small-scale echo in
The Magic Bubble
) does he act as a clear repository for female desirability, uncomplicated with generic subtext (like his work with the Coen brothers) or matters of his own input as writer or director (like
Leatherheads
). In many other films, such as the
Ocean's
series, his on-screen charm is key to his character's success, but this is nearly always within a more generically complex narrative than a simple romance. The romantic pairings in all four films discussed in this chapter are passable but they all lack the intensity and frisson generated between Clooney and Lopez in
Out of Sight
(see chapter 5).

Intolerable Cruelty
feels like an attempt to bring screwball up-to-date in its content, but this is always going to be difficult as this is a subgenre with specific historical roots and based on subtlety of wordplay and characterization. Unlike the generous tone of most classic screwball comedies, characters tend to operate in their own egocentric universes. Where such factors are taken into account (
O Brother
and, to a lesser extent, Clooney's own
Leatherheads
) the result seems more generically harmonious and viewers are encouraged to laugh with characters, rather than at them.

Remember everyone, this is a cartoon.

—Joel Schumacher
¹

I think we might have killed the franchise.

—George Clooney
²

This is the sequel
to Batman Forever
(1995), also directed by Schumacher and scripted by Akiva Goldsman, and represents an effort by Warner Brothers to widen the profitability of the
Batman
franchise with more family-friendly content. However, this is also accompanied by a tendency toward lightweight plotting, garish colors, and the kind of melodramatic overacting associated with the long-running TV series
Batman
(ABC, 1966–68), and further from Tim Burton's darker conception of Gotham in the first two films,
Batman
(1989) and
Batman Returns
(1992).

Perhaps it sounds perverse to criticize the film for being cartoonish, since that is the nature of its origins, but it is hard to find human qualities in the narrative with which to identify. In terms of generic expectations, it does not really deliver. There are fight sequences, but they are long, drawn-out affairs and several seem to achieve little beyond the destruction of scenery; and the sudden high-angle wide shots in such scenes feel like the style of the 1960s TV series with the obligatory “Pow!” signs appearing on screen. The visual styling is what predominates, and the upgrading of the Batmobile feels more like visiting a motor show than a movie theater. As an action movie, it lacks set-piece spectacular stunt work, the dialogue lacks witty Bond-like one-liners (an increasing part
of the franchise), and there is no on-screen chemistry between Batman and his villainous adversary Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) or romantic tension with Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman).

The cartoonish visual style also contributes to a lack of narrative development. The plot seems to go from one set-piece so-called action scene to another with very little action on display or narrative jeopardy at stake. The film as a whole is very episodic with the sense that several of the scenes could happen in almost any order. We see a series of large interior spaces—Gotham Art Gallery, the Observatory (twice), and the Costume Ball to auction the diamonds—and yet they each look exactly like what they are: large film sets. The scene as Poison Ivy reclaims an old Turkish bath as her new base has a particularly pointless fight scene, which lasts only a few seconds, with Bane (Jeep Swenson) ejecting a group of curiously painted thugs (accompanied by a sound effect like an old-fashioned swanee whistle, more redolent of musical hall than contemporary cinema). Poison Ivy's sidekick, Bane, looks like a WWF fighter in a gimp mask (not perhaps surprising since Swenson is a wrestler) who can only roar and throw people around. His sole piece of audible dialogue (“Bomb”) could be quite funny, like his final fate as a literally shrunken figure, lying on the ground if it was meant ironically. A strangely similar scene in
O Brother
, where Delmar sees Pete's clothes lying on a rock, yields comedy but here this is not possible as we never see Bane having any kind of emotional life.

Fight sequences are overtly choreographed with Batman and Robin (Chris O'Donnell) performing parallel kicks and backflips, and assailants attacking helpfully one at a time and all dressed in identical costume, identifying them as baddies, giving so-called action sequences the appearance of rehearsals. In the fight with the “hockey team from hell,” Batman's attackers look like extras from
Starlight Express
, and the wire work with Batman and Freeze seems cumbersome and unbelievable as they seem able to jump out of trouble at any point. It is the same weakness in
The Matrix
(the Wachowski brothers, 1999), where Neo can apparently fly off at will, logically making the fight scenes redundant. The key difference is that viewers do not mind this as those fights are spectacular; here, they are just ponderous. The action sequences use a camera positioning almost permanently on an oblique tilt, and unlike Burton's Gotham, here the cityscape and all the major landmarks (such as Arkham Asylum) look like models.

The stunts, such as Robin climbing up Freeze's escape capsule, the jump from Arkham Asylum, or the final fall from the Observatory, all follow the laws of gravity or probability extremely selectively. That in itself does
not stop films from working, but one has to believe that in the universe of the film such things are possible. Even where there is narrative jeopardy, suspense seems willingly avoided. We cut bizarrely and without explanation from a shot of Robin holding Barbara by a boot, dangling perilously off a bridge after being thrown from her bike, to the Wayne mansion with no explanation of how the pair escaped.

Batman himself represents the sometimes dull force of good and moral behavior and needs charismatic adversaries to fight against. The Batman movies have benefited from memorable performances from Jack Nicholson (the Joker), Danny DeVito (the Penguin), or even Jim Carrey (the Riddler), whose casting plays to their acting strengths as well as their physical appearance. However, in
Batman and Robin
, from the first name appearing on the opening credits, the towering presence of Schwarzenegger dwarfs other areas of production, in terms of his personal salary ($25 million), his dialogue, peppered with often unfunny one-liners, and the logistics of the hours of makeup that his character needed every day. His dialogue consists of little more than predictable gags and puns (“The ice-man cometh”), and after zapping an underling with his ice-gun, as he was trying to watch a copy of his wedding video, he declares, “I hate it when people talk during the movie.”

In theory, the plot twist of a good character, a scientist, turned bad through grief at the loss of his wife ought to make Freeze more nuanced, especially since this obviously sets up a link with Bruce Wayne's butler, Alfred (Michael Gough), who is also suffering from the same disease. However, Freeze's method of threat, covering Gotham in ice, reflects a character dominated by stasis rather than the literal ability to be chilling. From the opening with the Warner Brothers logo freezing, the film atrophies too. The visual conception of Freeze seems confused, shifting between two distinct looks: a neutered
Terminator
-style outfit with
Last Action Hero
cigar and cumbersome freezing gun or a bizarre dressing gown. Even extreme close-ups of his eyes tearing up, and later him actually crying, fail to humanize him. His henchmen are all interchangeable stock characters and are forced to do his eccentric bidding (singing “Frosty the Snowman”).

Schumacher, who is openly gay, might be criticized for adding unnecessary homosexual innuendo in the dialogue (Poison Ivy's offer to Batman to retrieve his stolen diamond is expressed more colloquially: “I'll help you grab your rocks”). The lack of engaging characters and action means that the audience's attention is more likely to be drawn to the superficial campiness of the whole production, and with the greater prominence of Robin as Batman's sidekick, it is perhaps inevitable that a gay subtext
(never far beneath the surface of the superhero franchise) seems more obvious.

The very first sight we have of the superhero duo is in a montage of suiting-up with a series of paired close-ups of gauntlets, leg protectors, chest, and codpieces. They seem a compilation of rubberized body parts (including prominent butt shots) rather than living beings, and the fact that each shot has a little motorized zoom, immediately followed by a parallel shot of the other man, creates a sense of almost dressing up in fetish wear for their partner. The final toe-to-head shot explicitly conveys a voyeuristic point of view of two fit men in rubber suits. In this context, such sequences feel more like part of a love story, reflected in the title, especially since the pair expend as much emotional energy on bickering with each other as they do on fighting crime. It is true that Batgirl is similarly attired in a further montage sequence much later but she has much less time on-screen. The increasingly phallic Batmobile, the close-ups of Clooney's crotch and butt, the additions of nipples to the batsuit, enlarged codpieces for both Batman and Robin, and even the gadgets (not huge in variety but at least 10 times a Batclip was fired from a belt to save one or both men), all suggest a certain amount of displacement activity.

Even Freeze rejects the attentions of a scantily clad black girl, and Poison Ivy jokingly describes Freeze's wife, held in suspended animation, as “frigid.” Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) is first seen dressed in schoolgirl uniform, which seems more evocative of clichéd erotica than strictly likely in context. The camera tilts down, inhabiting Robin's point of view as we are invited to look at Barbara's legs, but this is closer to a sibling situation and the relationship remains chaste through the film. Robin kisses Poison Ivy but only with special film over his lips to expose her duplicity and attempt to kill him: clearly women cannot be trusted. Uma Thurman's Mae West-style delivery promises steamy content, but beyond the skintight outfits the film delivers very little erotic charge. Her answer to Robin's request for a sign with “slippery when wet” seems as predictable in tone as Freeze's one-liners, and the fight between Batgirl and Poison Ivy seems more like a camp burlesque show.

Some of the background of the Batman franchise certainly supports a gay reading: A lone male hero, sharing a house with his companion, Robin, lives a secret double life. He does not seem interested in the approaches of women like Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) in
Batman
, Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) in
Batman Returns
, Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) in
Batman Forever
, and Julie Madison (Elle McPherson) here, who even proposes to Batman but he ignores her (supposedly for her safety). At the unveiling of the new Gotham telescope, he jokes with the
paparazzi, “Just don't point it at my bedroom.” Like the pose of togetherness for the cameras (Julie claims they are “recklessly in love” although we do not see this), there is something false about this performance of heterosexual normality as Bruce ducks the marriage question. Later at dinner, Julie is the one who obliquely proposes but Bruce bats (!) this away with “I'm not the marrying kind,” adding “There are things about me that you wouldn't understand.” He kisses Julie but calls her Ivy and momentarily projects the other woman's face onto the girl in front of him. As in the later function where Poison Ivy gains the keys from Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle) to activate the Batsignal, Bruce's attention seems distracted, looking away from Julie at his side at something he cannot place, giving him the look of a heterosexual hero not fully at ease with himself.

The scene with Alfred, in which Bruce declares “I love you, old man” before kissing him and receiving the same expression of love in return, which could emphasize Alfred as a surrogate father, would not usually attract much attention; but without the emotional depth in the film as a whole to support such statements, this sequence only adds to the suggestion of a suppressed sexuality. Add in the fetish leatherwear, the cave that might double for a metaphorical “closet,” dialogue like Robin's line to Batman “You have some real problems with women, you know that?” and that the only attraction that the male characters have for any female on screen is due to the pheromones that Poison Ivy blows onto the faces of her helpless male victims, and it is not hard to see why a gay subtext might suggest itself.