George Clooney (25 page)

However, the sequence in which Tess is miraculously turned into Julia Roberts only partly works. In literature, the idea of real people appearing or authors stepping into their own stories is an increasingly noticeable feature of writers from Vladimir Nabokov to Martin Amis to Douglas Coupland, but the medium of film seems more resistant to such boundary breaking. As Tess says, “It's just wrong.” However, Linus tries to assure her, “You're like an object. No one actually knows you,” which rapidly proves ironic as Bruce Willis (also playing himself) does recognize her. The sense of stars playing versions of themselves does reflect the reality of modern stardom and ironically could be seen to reflect the image of Clooney in particular (see his commercials in chapter 9). Life and art collide as we later see Clooney sipping wine, looking out from Toulour's palatial villa on Lake Como (using his own as a location), and ultimately giving Benedict's money away to charity in the kind of high-profile philanthropy that he and Pitt support. However, if Tess can pass for Julia Roberts just by putting on a hat, why does no one comment on the fact in the first film? Linus has a couple of interrupted questions to Rusty in the second film but it is not like an embarrassing secret; one might expect a visible reaction in other characters much earlier. If reference starts to be made to the real lives of actors, why does this only apply to Tess/Julia Roberts? Why does no one notice that Danny Ocean looks like George Clooney? The fact that only Bruce Willis is playing himself here underlines the inconsistency even more.

More problematically, why bother with the whole Julia Roberts idea at all if the real egg has been switched (which is revealed at the end), arguably undermining the point of much of the body of the film? Toulour may lose the bet in the strictest sense of the word, since Danny's team get the
egg, but the question of who is the better thief is hardly settled since the contest is grossly unfair in terms of numbers (although Toulour knew this in proposing the challenge). But more importantly, LeMarque (an uncredited Albert Finney) tips off Danny as to the whereabouts of the real egg; i.e., they cheat. Toulour does break the cardinal rule of loyalty among thieves by betraying them to Benedict, but it feels more like Toulour is positioned as the villain because of his arrogance, the fact that he is French, and, possibly, the most important point: he is not George Clooney.

The involvement of Milena Canonero (with whom Soderbergh and Clooney had worked on
Solaris
) adds to the sense of classic European design (as well as finding some great ill-fitting trousers for Brad Pitt to wear as a room cleaner) but also perhaps that the look of the film is more important than the coherence of its narrative. The final blurred freeze-frame of Isabel falling off her chair laughing reflects a cast at ease with one another but perhaps also the sense that these films are being made more for the pleasure of the participants than the audience.

The fact that the cast (and director) know each other so well and that this is the third film in the series means that dialogue can be even snappier, often incomplete, and employ even more in-jokes and pseudo-criminal terminology (some real, some not). Even the dialogue is explicitly filmic as Roman commands Danny to “Run it for me. Give me the big picture.” There are running gags through the franchise, such as the heavily tattooed character (Scott L. Schwartz). He appears as a supposed thug in the first film, only to let Danny escape, and resurfaces in the second as legal counsel to help free Frank (Bernie Mac) from jail. In the third film, he appears (uncredited) taking a large bundle of chips during the mini-earthquake.

The films neatly sidestep the whole notion of whether a casino robbery is a victimless crime by giving us a despicable casino owner to steal from (
Ocean's Eleven
) and then repay (
Ocean's Twelve
) and then an even more unprincipled, egotistical owner, Willy Bank (Al Pacino), for
Ocean's Thirteen
who has cheated Reuben, something of a father figure for
Danny. Thus we have personal motivation added to the unpleasant egoism of Bank wanting a Five Diamond Award for the opening of his new hotel. Here we have the wish fulfillment of breaking the bank and of turning the tables on those who normally stack the odds in their own favor. The unfeeling capitalism of the symbolically named Bank is represented in the way he casts Reuben aside and barks at his employees; and his manageress, Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin), echoes his own values: we see her sacking a waitress for having a body mass index adjudged to be is too high. Beneath the glamor of the casino world lurks much less refined motivation, reflected in Frank's instructions to prospective employees for his new gaming system, who can create the right level of sophistication by raising their hemlines three inches.

Tendencies in the first two films are greatly exaggerated here with a hugely overly complicated plot involving multiple cons (tampering with dice in Mexico, altering gaming machines, even engineering an earthquake) with narrative exposition delivered via an extended conversation with Roman, intercut with shots of these different problem areas. There is the familiar introduction of fresh obstacles (Benedict's command to steal the diamonds as well as break the bank or Weng's refusal to climb into a shaft) and apparent problems that transpire into solutions (Livingstone's nervous performance as a croupier emerges as a deliberate ploy, so Roman can enter and replace the machines with doctored ones). Commitment to the group overrides everything else as the film opens with Rusty walking away from the middle of a robbery after getting a call about Reuben.

There are still some good lines. Linus's bullish performance on the phone and refusal to hand over to Danny or Rusty is undercut by his final words, “Bye Dad,” or the hotel reviewer (David Paymer) thanking Bank personally for throwing him out after being hectored out of his room by the Malloy brothers, including the accusation that he has “nose cancer” and cannot detect his own bodily smell. There are several effective comic situations, like Linus as Lenny Pepperidge, “communicator” for Mr. Weng (Shaobo Qin, who also plays Yen), browbeating Sponder for having kept them waiting at the airport for seven minutes, an effective portrayal of the standards of hospitality that accompany excessive wealth. Linus's prosthetic nose making champagne flutes difficult, Saul's almost-imperceptible slap on Bank's butt as he passes him in the casino, or the daredevil costume sported by Cheadle as a fake Fender Roads, which is loud enough to distract him from the TV monitor, showing the faces of the gang rapidly being altered by Turk's hacking skills: such moments are largely enough to distract the viewer from the unwieldy plot.

Part of the pleasure of the third film is the pain inflicted on hotel/restaurant reviewers who may not always seem fair in their columns and a sense of Schadenfreude that the man in question here has to suffer the kind of poor service that less special customers might well experience on a more regular basis. The glimpses of factory conditions in Mexico are brief and the rapidly escalating mini-revolution is played for laughs, but this is the first time in the franchise that we have a sense that the wealth and privilege of the characters, high-rollers and criminal gang alike, are based on other low-wage economies.

There are some neat little creative touches, particularly relating to sound. In
Ocean's Twelve
, when Tarr's fledgling music career is interrupted, Soderbergh bleeps out all of his swearing and then this becomes an act of Benedict in the control room. In
Ocean's Thirteen
, Bank reads a poetic thank-you note that we hear on voice-over from the sender, until the sentiment and the woman's voice is suddenly interrupted by a bored Bank, who rips up the note.

The film is full of visual gags, like on-screen text, showing the extent of individual winnings next to customers, and the size of Bank's losses includes a gag, putting 5150 next to Clooney (shorthand medical code for an individual with mental problems) or the so-called “Gilroy” as a term for the hormone patch (a reference to Tony Gilroy, writer of the
Bourne
franchise and also writer/director of
Michael Clayton
, released the same year as
Ocean's Thirteen
). The running gag that at different points almost the whole cast seems to understand Yen's Chinese without any problems is also extended here as Tarr's techno-babble about problems with the drill that we expect to overwhelm Rusty receives a crisp comprehending answer. The in-jokes that pepper the final exchange between Danny and Rusty, that Clooney should keep his weight down (after
Syriana
) and that Pitt should settle down and have some children (as Pitt has done with Angelina Jolie), perhaps signal that this is a logical place to call time on the franchise. It has become a source of lucrative income that the cast (and Soderbergh) could tap again at some point if funding for less commercial projects were needed.

A deleted scene would have given us more of Clooney's fantastic Village People-style handlebar moustache and some ill-fitting false teeth and also a great line in which Rusty's story about a girl being surprised by him appearing without a towel is interrupted by Danny saying “Those are the waters” to which Rusty gives a knowing “Oh yeah” only to be corrected by Danny, “No, those are the waters,” pointing to an ostentatious water feature in the foyer of Bank's casino.

Clooney himself, despite posing prominently on the DVD case, appears in only three scenes as Jerzy, the master safecracker: the scene with the projector, the rooftop demonstration, and briefly at the funeral for Cosimo (Luis Guzmán). It is really only a cameo rather than his conventional star vehicle. Indeed, the film is an ensemble piece, in which there is no single main role. Observing the film of the jeweler's (which he describes above), the amateurishness of the team is readily apparent with the final number of the combination repeatedly obscured by someone blocking the view. Jerzy appears in the extreme foreground of the viewing scene, wheeling himself closer to the screen and from darkness into light, revealing a look close to Everett in
O Brother
with his hair tousled and his face often set with a slightly wide-eyed expression.

On the rooftop, the absurdity of the situation becomes even more apparent. Despite cloaking himself in the aura of a teacher (“I have a class to teach”), the only wisdom that he has to impart involves a handheld circular saw, which you have to crank for around three hours to make a small hole (supposedly) in the side of the safe. He will have nothing to do with explosives (possibly the source of his wheelchair-bound existence) and hails his method as the cleanest if not the quickest (“It's the method I was taught. It is what I believe in.”). He appears once more at the funeral home in a laughably bad disguise as a Hasidic rabbi, which supposedly prevents him being identified by Detective Babitch (David Warshofsky) who is watching the scene from a car across the street. The irony of Jerzy's own appearance seems lost on him as he calls the others idiots for being so easy to identify.

Instead of his usual role as the leader of a heist, here Clooney is the possessor of supposedly specialist knowledge, but in keeping with the lack of talents in the rest of the group, he is as much a loser as they are. He is a joke to local children who tease him by shouting that the police are coming, sending him into a blind panic, throwing a sheet over the safe. His spluttering at the children (“fucking midgets”) is funny but also underlines his impotence to do anything about it. The clap he gives in the projector scene at being offered a part on the team is partly the stupidity of the offer (given his wheelchair-bound situation) but also his frustration at his own situation. Jerzy is an absurd version of Jim Byrd from
Confessions
, also advising the group to “Watch your back,” and Seth in
From Dusk Till Dawn
whose tattoos, which had been visible on his neck, are subsequently revealed more fully by his wearing just a vest.

Clooney was the last cast member on board, and his scenes act as additional rather than central material to the plot, which could function without them, but nonetheless he adds some comic depth in keeping with the tone of the whole. Clooney seems absent from the DVD extras package, which is perhaps logical given his small on-screen time, and then he appears behind the camera, pulling faces at the Russo brothers during their segment. It seems that both he and particularly Soderbergh, who first saw their film
Pieces
(1997) at the Slamdance Festival, were drawn by a style, sensibility, and method of working (Joe is also an actor but they operate as two heads speaking with one mind) that seems like a younger version of the Coen brothers.

The Russos acknowledge the debt to
Big Deal on Madonna Street/I soliti ignoti
(Mario Monicelli, 1958) at the end of the credits. The Russos maintain small elements in the film that hint at the Italian source material but there is really only a residual element (casting an Italian, Jennifer Esposito as the maid, Camilla), and the terminology, which seems drawn from a blend of gangster movies and adolescent slang, is altered a little (their dream crime, their “Bellini,” and the notion of a patsy to take the blame for a crime, a “Mulinski”; Riley, played by William H. Macy, later claims the Bellini is starting to look like a disaster or “Kapuchnik”). The much-used term “Bellini” does not appear in Monicelli's film (he uses “Peccora” or sheep for “Mulinski”) and stems from a local Collinwood story about a man, given a job at the Federal Reserve, who mysteriously disappeared (presumably with some of the money he was responsible for incinerating). Some names are changed slightly (Peppe becomes Pero) and some are shifted to make a more subtle allusion (Michael Jeter's character is called Toto, the stage name of the actor playing Clooney's part in the original).