George Clooney (31 page)

Deleted scenes would have shown us Bob's wife (Greta Scacchi) at an airport, a Tehran café, and the hospital, but their removal does keep the focus on him and the political situation with the cost to his family carried more effectively in the single scene with his son. In the airport scene, shown in passing on the featurette but not as part of the deleted scenes, we see Bob asking his wife what she would do if she knew something bad was going to happen and could stop it. Bearing in mind Bob was in charge of the assassination of Nasir until the operation went wrong, his sudden conversion does seem strange, and a little more of this kind of material might have made this about-face seem more plausible, albeit shifting the ensemble global narrative closer to a personal wrestling with conscience. The deleted café scene, which does appear on the DVD extras, provides some resonance between the couple and underlines the sacrifice that Bob is making at a personal as well as professional level, but it also could be seen as an unnecessary distraction in an already complex narrative. The Asteroids video game, which their son is playing in the background, is more of a loss, as the increasing volume of objects hemming in the spacecraft is a neat image of growing pressure on Bob and his eventual demise by the missile attack.

The script juxtaposes different family groups (Bob, Bryan, Wasim, Holiday, and the rival Arabic brothers) to stress how similar they are all are, making the film akin to a family drama at times. Bryan's family is the most rounded group, especially with small touches like the tactile relationship with his children, holding hands and picking them up at every opportunity, and his slightly overprotective attitude to one of the boys, Max, adding power to the sequence of the swimming pool accident. The actual moment of death or violence is avoided: we focus instead on a long shot of Bryan walking back toward the pool, before we hear panicked screams and his gradual realization of what has happened before he jumps into the pool. Later, Bryan prattles on about superficial differences between Western and Eastern culture, prompting his wife to note that he “sounds strange.” The unspoken element here is grief, which neither can articulate, Bryan even echoing the boy's last movements, frowning down into a pool before diving in.

The film in particular juxtaposes different strained father-son relationships. Bob's son has to endure a father who habitually evades the truth and drags the family to strange places around the world without a clear and honest explanation. Wasim indulges a father constantly prattling
about the snow-covered mountains of Pakistan, a different form of the American Dream, and a squalid working environment, living in a cramped compound with only rudimentary washing facilities, separated from the rest of his family. However, the network of family and friends is humanized, as we see Wasim playing soccer and arguing about the powers of Spiderman. The scene of Wasim walking through a game of cricket, apparently asking for a bus fare from his father but really hugging him goodbye, has a powerful poignancy. There is also clear family strife among the emirs in terms of a power struggle between the brothers over succession from their ailing father and about the future political direction of the region, literalized in the battle for oil contracts between the United States and China. The least detailed, Holiday's father, who appears repeatedly sitting on the steps of his house, has a drinking problem and is a thorn in Holiday's side, but we see little more than this, even though a wordless reconciliation between them is the final image of the film.

Clooney won a deserved Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for a performance where he is not afraid to look physically vulnerable. The torture scenes do not shy away from the direct visceral action. Massawi describes what he is going to do and we see him pull fingernails with pincers. There are shots of Bob's feet flinching, his labored breathing, his cries of pain, but these are in addition to direct shots of the act of disfigurement, not replacing them. Punches are repeated, direct, and accompanied by a visceral Foley crunch rather than any spectacular smacking sound. Bob is knocked off his chair and we cut to Bob's oblique point of view from the ground as he sees Massawi walking toward him, brandishing a knife. Throughout the scene he has been stripped half naked, revealing his overweight and untoned torso, and lying on the floor, his trousers with a tight waistband emphasize his paunch.

Alexandre Desplat's score was nominated for a Golden Globe. His main theme, plaintive but haunting, returns at moments of particular drama or wider shots that suggest something of the sheer scale and beauty of the region of the landscape, such as the opening shots of men waiting for buses in the early morning mist or later footage of the huge refinery with workers signaling to each other like Native Americans in westerns.

Clooney seems interested in the human aspect of the intelligence services, in terms of both their motivation as well as the more bizarre practices in training and in the field (as Baer states, “In the end, intelligence boils down to people.”).
⁵
This might involve lengthy and unspectacular legwork. Unfortunately, this does not make for exciting film narratives, and trailers sometimes misrepresent these films as action-driven (such as
The American
), leading to some disappointment among viewers when their expectations are not met.

“It's a Tony Scott/Bourne Identity kind of a movie … without the explosions.”

—Ethan Coen
⁶

The film blends farce and family drama with a focus on the private lives of those who work for the intelligence services. There is an A-list cast, several of whom have worked repeatedly with the Coen brothers so presumably they are happy to do so, in a relaxed working environment on material that is different from the vast majority of scripts that come their way.

From the outset, we see Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) as something of a loser, getting into a needless argument with Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), mostly referred to as Ozzie, spilling food down his tie and talking with his mouth full. Harry belittles his wife's work in front of others and is bluntly taken off to the kitchen by Katie (Tilda Swinton) to allow his wife, Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), to speak for herself. His tetchy reaction at the party to Ozzie's slightly risqué joke about “discharging his weapon” suggests a literal humorlessness and a general antipathy toward the other man or, as it turns out, a bit of both. He uses the same form of words in small talk, irrespective of who he is talking to (he admires both Katie's and Linda's flooring) and seems bound by habits like his instinctive postcoital urge for a run. Sex seems to be just another form of exercise to which he seems mildly addicted, and stressed about when he is prevented from performing. Costume designer, Mary Zophres, puts Clooney in a plaid shirt with a fairly cheap cut of trousers, and along with his own addition of a gold chain, he has the look of someone lacking wit and sartorial style, almost an anti-Danny Ocean.

The scene in which Harry waves his wife off on her trip to Seattle, only to turn and his smile to drop as he spots a car down the street, effectively shifts the tone from relaxed domesticity to unsettled bemusement and he is framed in silhouetted long shot, alone and vulnerable. The first time he is aware of a car, while out running, small jump cuts and a zoom that is then interrupted neatly suggest his unease. However, unlike films like David Fincher's
The Game
(1997) in which the life of the main character is gradually upside down into a world that might be genuine threat or paranoia, this is not really pursued. Near the end, Linda (Frances McDormand) looks up at a helicopter overhead and feels as if she is being
watched by the drivers of cars that pull up alongside or appear to be following her, but this is not the final section of Martin Scorsese's
Good Fellas
(1990) and neither a genuine closing in of security personnel or a descent into overwhelming paranoia is convincing here.

Harry is seen coming out of a Home Depot, framed as if from the point of view of a car, and yet at this stage there is no surveillance on him as the disc has not been discovered in the gym. For an experienced intelligence officer, Harry might well surmise that he is being watched in connection with Ozzie's sacking or at least make some tentative inquiries through contacts at work as to what is going on. Like Katie, we get little real clear view of his competence. He downplays the drama of being a bodyguard, trotting out the fact that he has never drawn his weapon in 20 years, but this feels more like dinner party chatter than meaningful. It does prepare us for the speed and act of shooting Chad (Brad Pitt) perhaps but does not help us in reading this as accidental, an overreaction, or justifiable given the circumstances.

Harry is a moral coward. Talking in bed with Katie, she interrupts his platitudes about mortality, and when faced with the proposal of specific action, separation, and probable divorce, he shies away claiming that it is too hard “to inflict that kind of pain” (sensitivity to the feelings of others, which does not stop him from sleeping around). Similarly, later he tries to portray his sexual opportunism as selflessness in questioning the timing of Katie's proposed divorce of Ozzie. She is not blind to this. When he says that he will be easier to deal with “if he doesn't feel cornered,” she asks whether he is talking about Ozzie or himself. In agreeing to eat the food offered him by Linda, he resolves to “live dangerously,” but apart from a slight choke, he does not. He appears to be opening up to Linda in admitting he is married but then goes on to claim they are separated, just to get enough moral distance to persuade Linda to sleep with him. The period of time in which he moves in with Katie is slightly surreal, as unbeknown to her, Sandy is only away on a business trip and after a row, Harry goes out to the car to phone his wife begging her to come home; i.e., he is playing at being separated, neatly compartmentalizing the worlds of his wife and various lovers. He may compare favorably to Linda's previous lover, explicitly laughing at part of the same film that left the other man unmoved, but it also suggests a rather cold process of vetting on the part of Linda, going to exactly the same film just to compare reactions.

His wife does call him a “mystery man,” but the building of the sex device is fairly bizarre. He might describe himself as a “hobbyist” and someone with an eye for a bargain but that does not explain why he
makes this particular item. It is the only thing he takes out of the family home, in an oddly shaped bag, and it is the object he vents his anger on when he finds he has been betrayed, which would suggest he is making it for his wife. We can only imagine, however, what her reaction might have been. Linda seems genuinely impressed (“It's wonderful”) and the camera lingers on her reaction, apparently mesmerized.

The character of Harry has elements of previous Clooney roles. As in
Solaris
, we see him cutting vegetables in an echoing home environment, his lover at some distance from him. However, despite the somber strings we hear on the soundtrack, it is relatively late to introduce such a mood shift. Here, Clooney's expression has to encompass guilt and bemusement (he still has no idea who Chad is), and he has no one he can confide in. However, the film struggles to accommodate such an elegiac tone, and his “You know, you really are a negative person” and Sandy's response, telling him “to behave,” seem stuck in a PC land of comfortable middle-class squabbling, rather than anything more existential. Clooney and the rest of the cast get the most from the material (which was largely written for them, with the exception of Tilda Swinton), producing some great individual scenes, such as the first mention of the disc. Its exact location shifts in the course of Chad's explanation from the floor to a locker to a locker in the ladies' changing room, stressing that it was hardly a random find, but overall, these often feel more like material for a trailer.

Seen first of all cracking a gym customer's joint in a way that does not sound good, Chad seems almost more a collection of visual and verbal tics than a complete character (bad dyed hair, frequently giving a melodramatic “Oh my God,” and trying to sound enigmatic as a blackmailer by referring to Cox's “sensitive shit”). He accepts Linda's insistence that he has to wear a suit to make his blackmail threat in person but still appears on his bike. His dance moves while listening to music, in Linda's flat, on a treadmill, and even in a car while supposedly watching Ozzie's house are all funny but reflect the law of diminishing returns. Beyond physical comedy (like the rabbit punch, which reduces him to silence holding a tissue to his nose in the following embassy scenes), there is little his character can offer as he is not intelligent enough to initiate action. Trying to sound different, not just on the phone but in person by repeatedly using Cox's full name and giving himself the name Mr. Black (a Coen allusion to Pitt's role in Martin Brest's 1998
Meet Joe Black
), makes Chad absurd, especially the pride that he takes in taking Ozzie literally, when he jokes about them both knowing each other's name.

It is hard not to feel that Ozzie's term for the blackmailers, “a league of morons,” might well apply to most of the main characters. The CIA is
presented not as seeking to solve problems but simply to make them go away. The description of the disposal of the bodies of Chad and Ted (Richard Jenkins) via dialogue rather than visualizing the act keeps such elements at the level of farce rather than gangster movie, but if life is so cheap in the narrative (the boss is visibly disappointed on being told that Ozzie is not dead), it is hard to care about any of the characters.

There are a number of satirical targets on offer, like soulless Internet dating (after disappointing sex, Linda checks a man's wallet to find a domestic note from his betrayed wife) and call center machines that cannot recognize clearly enunciated English, and the whole notion of exercise culture is seen either as an unhealthy compulsion (in Harry) or an unprincipled business (when Chad and Linda try to extort money from property, which is not so much found as overtly stolen). The script is full of small peripheral details, which seem extraneous but add a quirky depth to characterization, like Katie asserting that “I don't hammer” while beating her fist on the table, or Ted's former life as a Greek Orthodox priest, whose congregation boasted Chevy Chase among its number, or the package addressed to “Oliver the cat who lives in the rotunda.” Sandy's book that she is promoting in Seattle is a ridiculous children's version of political processes, entitled
Point of Order, Oliver
, as the main character attempts to interrupt a filibuster.