The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (79 page)

He works very hard nowadays, but the grim truth sinks deeper—this great man is no longer funny: in a short,
Taking the Wheel
(02, David Ackerman);
Scorched
(02, Gavin Grazer);
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
(02, Ron Underwood);
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
(02, Chris Columbus); Q in
Die Another Day
(02, Lee Tamahori);
Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
(03, McG);
Around the World in 80 Days
(04, Frank Coraci).

He does voices for animation:
Valiant
(05, Gary Chapman);
Charlotte’s Web
(06, Gary Winick);
Man About Town
(06, Mike Binder);
Shrek the Third
(07, Chris Miller and Raman Hui);
Igor
(08, Anthony Leondis); but he was himself and painfully earnest as a Nobel Prizewinner trying to save Earth in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(08, Scott Derrickson);
The Pink Panther 2
(09, Harald Zwart);
Planet 51
(09, Jorge Blanco).

René Clément
(1913–96), b. Bordeaux
1936:
Soigne ton Gauche
(s). 1937:
L’Arabie Interdite
(d). 1938:
La Grande Chartreuse
(d). 1939:
La Bièvre
(d). 1940:
Le Triage
(d). 1942:
Ceux du Rail
(d). 1943:
La Grande Pastorale
(d). 1944:
Chefs de Demain
(d). 1946:
La Bataille du Rail; Le Père Tranquille
. 1947:
Les Maudits
. 1948:
Au-delà des Grilles
. 1950:
Le Château de Verre
. 1952:
Jeux Interdits/Forbidden Games
. 1954:
Monsieur Ripois/Knave of Hearts
. 1955:
Gervaise
. 1958:
Barrage Contre le Pacifique/The Sea Wall
. 1959:
Plein Soleil
. 1961:
Quelle Joie de Vivre
. 1962:
Le Jour et l’Heure
. 1964:
Les Félins/The Love Cage
. 1966:
Paris, Brûle-t-il?/Is Paris Burning?
. 1969:
Le Passager de la Pluie
. 1971:
La Maison sous les Arbres/The Deadly Trap
. 1975:
Baby Sitter—Un Maledetto Pasticcio/Wanted: Babysitter
. 1972:
La Course du Lièvre à Travers les Champs
.

Clément’s first film was a short,
Soigne ton Gauche
, in which Jacques Tati acted. He made several more documentaries during the war before his first feature,
La Bataille du Rail
, a deliberate attempt to revive authenticity after so many allegorical films made under the Occupation. As a tribute to the Resistance it is moving if rather limited, and its stress on accurate reconstruction is more political than artistic.
Les Maudits
, however, was a conventional war melodrama, concerning a submarine of Nazis fleeing to South America. Clément’s work on Cocteau’s
La Belle et la Bête
(45) was in a technical rather than an artistic capacity and it was only in the 1950s that he began to show a personality of his own.
Jeux Interdits
is a sensitive study of the effects of war on children. But in
Knave of Hearts
, filmed in London, Clément suddenly revealed humor and romantic gaiety. The story, of a philandering Gérard Philipe, is enriched by a use of real locations that was years ahead of its time and showed a London largely neglected by British filmmakers.
Gervaise
was transcribed Zola with the most careful period reconstruction and an early, agonized performance from Maria Schell. The veering from near improvisation to studio recreation suggested Clément’s indecisiveness.
The Sea Wall
was another unexpected enterprise, a version of a Marguerite Duras novel about the tensions within a family, using several American actors.
Plein Soleil
is a suntanned film noir redolent of the American thriller: indeed, its basis is a Patricia Highsmith novel. The ambiguity of Alain Delon’s playing and Henri Decaë’s vivid Mediterranean photography make this the most satisfying film of a director probably at his best when setting out to entertain. After that, Clément’s work grew dull, and
Is Paris Burning?
has all the slow caution of an international epic as well as being a sad decline from the raw verity of
La Bataille du Rail
.

Montgomery Clift
(1920–66), b. Omaha, Nebraska
Clift is the sainted mess in that trio of American actors who loomed in the 1950s—Brando, Clift, and Dean (two of them born in Omaha). We know now how far Clift was destroyed by drink, drugs, and neurosis; and we recognize the neurosis being intensified by his gay yearnings that had to lurk within a heterosexual image. In
Red River
, Clift was a trail-hardened cowboy; in
A Place in the Sun
, he was in some of the screen’s most clinging, infatuated, heterosexual embraces; while in
From Here to Eternity
, he was a model of rugged male integrity, but a boxer who wants to fight no more. And Clift was beautiful—which is the way movie stars are expected to be. Does his torture bear out that secret permission by which viewers can aspire to same-sex fantasies? Is it possible that Clift, too, had to look at his own pictures to see what he might be? Clift’s career helps us see (or suspect) that sort of sexual double agentry in all films. After all, the dark is the greatest closet, and the most obliging.

He began in amateur theatricals in his teens and appeared in summer stock before making his Broadway debut in 1935 in
Fly Away Home
, subsequently appearing in
The Skin of Our Teeth, Our Town
, and
You Touched Me
. His first released film was Zinnemann’s
The Search
(48) as a GI in Europe caring for a child refugee. But a year before, Hawks had cast him as Mathew Garth in
Red River
(the release of which was delayed): a memorable performance in one of Hawks’s finest films, worthwhile not only for its picture of a lean, practical, and independent cowboy but for the way it seemed to compel John Wayne into thinking about his part. That film made Clift a star, and thereafter he worked sparingly in dramatic parts: as the flawed lover in Wyler’s
The Heiress
(49); in
The Big Lift
(50, George Seaton); as Dreiser’s doomed hero in
A Place in the Sun
(51, George Stevens); as the conscience-torn priest in Hitchcock’s
I Confess
(52); as Prewett, the rebellious soldier, in
From Here to Eternity
(53, Zinnemann).

His career faltered with the unhappy Selznick–Jennifer Jones–de Sica
Indiscretion of an American Wife
(54), and, in 1957, while making
Raintree County
(Edward Dmytryk), he was seriously injured in a car accident. His handsomeness was visibly undermined and the earlier concentration collapsed. In
The Young Lions
(58, Dmytryk),
Lonelyhearts
(59, Vincent J. Donehue), and
Judgment at Nuremberg
(61, Stanley Kramer), he was reduced from a tragic hero to a victim irretrievably damaged by suffering. He filled in less demanding roles for Mankiewicz in
Suddenly Last Summer
(59) and for Huston in
The Misfits
(60), but only Kazan’s
Wild River
(60) fruitfully used his new, insecure character. In 1962, he delved further into neurosis for Huston in
Freud: The Secret Passion
, but made only one more film,
L’Espion
(66, Raoul Levy), in France, before his death.

George Clooney
, Lexington, Kentucky, 1961
2002:
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
. 2005: episodes from
Unscripted
(TV);
Good Night, and Good Luck
. 2008:
Leatherheads
.

It’s clear, as he comes up on fifty, that George Clooney is the most widely liked actor in American pictures—and it’s clear that he knows it and is not prepared to dispute it. Cary Grant (shall we add?) was fifty in 1954 (just about the moment of
To Catch a Thief
), and only ten years or so away from retirement. Of course, the two men are not identical. Clooney deserves to be taken seriously as a director, even if his most interesting film,
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
, begins to feel a long time ago. Nor did Grant hold himself up as a tent pole for pals, helping to produce pictures like
Fail Safe, Far from Heaven, Syriana, Michael Clayton, The Informant
, and
The Men Who Stare at Goats
(among others).

Is it more to the point to ask whether the flurry of his other activities has helped put a bit of a blur over what Clooney really does—his acting? And there, of course, he is in the ring with Grant, offering to do gentlemanly comedy and urbane drama not just with the same ease but with a moral flexibility that sometimes makes it hard to tell one from the other. George Clooney is attractive, smart, level (in the sense of not being swept away from cool judgment), teasingly romantic, and palpably not a kid (in the way Depp and Cruise are still boys). Clooney is a man. He possesses a real irony. And he is happy to be photographed, and happier still to step back into the subtlety or the confusion that can ask and say, who am I now? In short, he has a lot of the material it would take to be the most interesting and equivocal actor of our time.

Everything except the parts? And everything except the innate anxiety that cannot quite trust his own image. Thus, it’s important to stress that Clooney behaves as if he is “George Clooney”—suave, contented, immaculate, his own pal—while Cary Grant never once in his life was persuaded that he had become “Cary Grant.” What Clooney lacks is the unease, the dissatisfaction with himself that could permit the heights of drama or comedy in any relationship. His being pleased with himself comes in advance of our response, and takes the edge of decision away from us. But it is his own safety net, too, and it is the sign that he is not quite ready to let himself be vulnerable.

Of course, Clooney’s camera-style is not as casual as it seems. It’s the result of very hard work, rooted in the understanding that a little less would go much further, and established in hours of screen time in the only way possible in his mind—in TV series. Thus, before taking on the movies, Clooney had done his time on
E/R
(1984–85),
The Facts of Life
(1985–87),
Baby Talk
(1991),
Roseanne
(1988–91),
Bodies of Evidence
(1992–93),
Sisters
(1993–94), and even an episode of
Friends
(1995). This was more than enough to establish the soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed smart-ass who generally got the better of everyone. But who, in the process, had grown accustomed to the low-stakes, low-light level of being “on” as the last alternative to “off.” Years later, there is a sediment in Clooney, like sleep in his eyes, a sub-par alertness that knows nothing matters except being on TV.

Twenty years or so after that TV work, Clooney has translated that image into movies, and rather more tellingly he has made it a feature of talk shows and celebrity events where he is able to keep his cool and his sense of humor, while seeming the most connected star in Hollywood (his actual politics are vague), the friend and the ennabler for careers like those of Matt Damon and Steven Soderbergh. Though as an actor, Clooney has access to a darker side—as witness
Syriana
and
Michael Clayton
—he has not yet brought off anything like unrelieved failure or tragedy. He has hardly seemed ruffled, let alone wasted. And the biggest obstacle to that may be his sense of superiority and his instinct that, these days, you can front a lot of indifferent films if you never commit yourself. (No one cares if Danny Ocean does the “big job,” because he has no self-respect. He is seeing a movie he knows by heart.) So why shouldn’t an actor stay out of reach of the darkest moods and destinies?

Why shouldn’t he be—nothing more nor less—than a man living in pretence? He ought to commit suicide before the job goes through. That may not appeal to Clooney, but it does suggest that his best quality—his lazy hipness—is a warning to him not to get over-involved.

For his movie career, he chose to begin with
Return of the Killer Tomatoes!
(88, John De Belo);
From Dusk Till Dawn
(96, Robert Rodriguez); and
One Fine Day
(96, Michael Hoffmann), in which he was the employee of his co-star and producer, Michelle Pfeiffer. That reminds us how swiftly he moved in taking charge of his business. He was Batman in
Batman & Robin
(97, Joel Schumacher), a film that seemed to belong to several others before it was his—he has never fought to control a film;
The Peacemaker
(97, Mimi Leder), which no one seems to remember; and then striking up real chemistry with Jennifer Lopez in
Out of Sight
(98, Soderbergh).

After that, he was in
The Thin Red Line
(98, Terrence Malick);
Three Kings
(99, David O. Russell);
Fail Safe
(00, Stephen Frears); showing real humor in
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
(00, the Coen Brothers); a kind of armchair fisherman in
The Perfect Storm
(00, Wolfgang Peterson)—he doesn’t often exert himself;
Spy Kids
(01, Rodriguez); and then
Ocean’s Eleven
(01, Soderbergh), where the true meaning of the title was the mental age at which it was aimed; in a small part in
Welcome to Collinwood
(02, Anthony and Joe Russo).

He was Chris Kelvin in the remake of
Solaris
(02, Soderbergh), a project that seemed far from Clooney’s buttons. He did a cameo in
Spy Kids 3-D
(03, Rodriguez); he was funny in
Intolerable Cruelty
(03, the Coen Brothers);
Ocean’s Twelve
(04, Soderbergh); Fred Friendly in his own
Good Night, and Good Luck
(05); at his best so far in
Syriana
(05, Stephen Gaghan), with a shabby, slightly overweight edge that got him a supporting Oscar; all at sea in
The Good German
(06, Soderbergh);
Ocean’s Thirteen
(07, Soderbergh); as
Michael Clayton
(07, Tony Gilroy), where he seemed to think the obscure pretensions amounted to deadly earnest; in his own
Leatherheads
, his least valuable film; funny in
Burn After Reading
(06, the Coen Brothers), but only up to a guarded point; and then, at last, with some sense of emerging in
Up in the Air
(09, Joel Reitman), as a man who has run away from every decision that he needs to make; too coarse doing the voice for
Fantastic Mr. Fox
(09, Wes Anderson);
The Men Who Stare at Goats
(09, Grant Heslov).