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Chicago Tribune article by Susan King a few weeks ago articulated something that I had been thinking about: many of George Clooney’s movie roles seem to reflect on various periods in 20th century America.
I know what you’re thinking. First, you’re asking yourself, “How much time does this guy spend thinking about George Clooney, and what does that say about him?” Or, “John had a thought a blog posting he’d like to make and the next day an article with a similar concept appears in the Chicago Tribune? Yeah,right.”
Whatever. Take your doubts and your questions and peddle them elsewhere.
King wrote that Clooney’s roles “
transcend time.” I suppose they do. They are timeless, and timely, reflections of the American past. In “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Clooney travels with two other knuckleheads through the Depression-era South. “Good Night and Good Luck” touches on McCarthyism in the ‘50s, and is even shot in black and white, as was Clooney’s remake for TV of the Cold War classic “Failsafe.” Speaking of black and white films, Clooney was in “The Good German,” set in Berlin just after World War II. Even “Michael Clayton,” while set in the present day, is a throwback, done in the style of ‘70s films like “Three Days of the Condor” and “All the President’s Men,” both of which starred another heartthrob with a distinct political consciousness, Robert Redford. And of course, the “Oceans” trilogy, while again set in the present day, hearkens back to the swingin’ late ‘50s and early ‘60s of Sinatra and his merry Rat Pack, when men could smoke and drink and chase broads and, you know, be “men,” behaving in a distinctly politically incorrect way frowned upon now.
Piled on this “film as American history” scrum is the newest Clooney movie. Set in 1925 at the dawn of professional football, “Leatherheads,” is a film described by Michael Phillips of the Tribune as “
tragically...just ok.” Uhmmm, I wouldn’t think that the quality of a film, especially a light comedy, could be described with such adjectival hyperbole as “tragedy.” Shouldn’t the word “tragedy” be reserved for natural disasters or violent human rampages or the last century of Cubs baseball? But I digress. I enjoyed “Leatherheads.” It is a screwball comedy with snappy patter, and while the comedy is perhaps now quite screwball enough and the patter not quite snappy enough, it was still an enjoyable time spent at the theater. My wife got to watch George Clooney, I got to watch guys in leather helmets knock each other down on fields of mud. Everyone walked away from this movie happy for their own reasons.
Essentially, Clooney has had roles that cover most of the eras of the 20th century, our century, the American century. The only time span missing from the Clooney film canon is the first two decades. Perhaps Clooney could do a bio-pic of Theodore Roosevelt, thereby covering the whole darn century. I think Clooney would make an interesting Teddy. Speaking of TR, here’s an intriguing thought: Clooney should remake “Arsenic and Old Lace,” in which he recreates the Cary Grant role, and perhaps John Goodman could be the crazy uncle who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt. Everyone equates the handsome star quality Clooney has with that of Cary Grant anyway, so why not capitalize on that and make a fun, goofy movie at the same time.
It’s this Hollywood star quality that Clooney has that also transcends time. He is a star in the old fashioned sense in a lot of ways. He’s handsome in a classic way, in that women dig him and men want to be him. Women may dig Johnny Depp (and he’s a great actor who’s made brave role choices), but men do not want to be him. Too pretty, too effeminate. Generally, men want to be the kind of guy who can get the girl and then take her home to a house he built himself.
But to say Clooney’s roles transcend time only scratches the surface of what’s going on with George Clooney and his film choices. There is something about Clooney and his films that touches something deep in the American psyche.
Perhaps what Clooney is touching is a sense of nostalgia, a longing for an America that possibly never was, at least not exactly. In the 21st century, life is a lot more complicated that ever before. While the US may still be king of the world, we’re not the only big dog out there. There’s some big players, namely China, that are shoving this big dog around, making him worry a little about losing his dog house to foreclosure by a Chinese bank. And there are lots of little, dangerous, fang baring dogs, namely terrorists, biting and inflicting bloody wounds, hoping we will be discouraged and cease to put up a fight.
Clooney, particularly in the “Oceans” movies, hearkens back to a more carefree and confident time in America. A time when we drank cocktails at pool parties, washed our steaks down with scotch, had a cigarette afterwards, and didn’t worry about the deleterious effects of any of this on our hearts and arteries. Americans were successful and wealthy (at least by comparison to citizens of some other nations) and that was the way we rolled.
To be truthful, while we may yearn for a “carefree” state, I think what Americans really miss is the feeling of almost total confidence. No matter what was thrown at us, a Great Depression and a Dust Bowl, a world war, a cold war, an increasingly untrustworthy government, we always felt confident that we would persevere. We could, eventually, with hard work, lick whatever problem came our way. Jobs would come back and the wind will die down and crops will grow again. We’ll beat Hitler and Tojo. We’ll stop communism in it’s tracks. We’ll get somebody better in the White House next time. Confidence coupled with ability and perseverance never seemed to let us down.
That’s why Clooney can be in films like “O Brother” and “Good Night,” and all the others, because we know the Depression ended with World War II, which we won and then we defeated two evil empires, that of communism abroad and McCarthyism at home. We’ve put honest people in government on occasion and never gave up on a sense that right will always ultimately prevail over wrong. That sense is shaken mightily in the 21st century, after almost eight years of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden and Iraq and recession and Katrina.
America, without realising it, looks at Clooney as a reminder of the mighty force of good that we, as a nation, once were. Times may never really have been carefree, what with depressions and wars. But the times, and the people, were more confident, and we lack that now. Clooney tells us tales of what once was, and indeed, may be again.
