George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  The adaptation builds the role of Tully as Jake’s driver and makes Lena much more culpable, which both erode the centrality of Jake as the hero. The opening of the book as Jake’s plane arrives in Berlin, the description of the city, and the conversation with a congressman could have been a succinct introduction to the political maneuvering that the hero is flying into and given a much stronger sense that Jake knows the city (a fact we are later told in the film, rather than feel). In the novel, Lena and Tully never meet. Lena is nursed back to health by a patient and loving Jake, motivating scenes of a romantic and sexual nature, and closes with Emil and a son (Erich), cut from the film, being given safe passage to the United States. In building Tully’s part in the film, it diminishes Jake, whose expositional dialogue about his experience of politics, the camps, and Berlin makes his blindness to Tully’s duplicity even more ironic.

  In the film, it is Tully who is seen first as Lena’s former partner (which we see before we even know of any connection with Jake). Tully’s virtual pimping of Lena to anyone who will pay partly motivates her shooting him, but the film blackens her character to the extent that she cannot form a close emotional bond with the hero without compromising him morally and dramatically in the eyes of the audience. By showing us more of Tully (a character who is then removed from the narrative), the film feels more seedy, with Jake only a bit-part player rather than the male lead. The film, although generally expressed through Jake’s point of view, also includes voice-over comment from Tully (threatening to dominate the opening section where he boasts that “war was the best thing that ever happened to me”) and even later briefly from Lena.

  By making Lena cold and distant (several of her scenes have her speaking while facing away from Jake) as well as morally reprehensible, the film prevents the relationship with Jake from developing. In the novel, the sexual scene between Jake and Lena as she takes a bath evokes the bathroom scene in Out of Sight but there is no similar chemistry here. Likewise, the link with Solaris, of a man having a second chance at love, does not really come alive as their relationship seems stillborn from the outset. When Jake finally meets Lena in the bar, there is limited eye contact (she hears his voice before she sees him), and whereas Solaris spends the body of its narrative exploring what a pair of lovers feel about each other, here the meeting is instantly and brutally interrupted by Tully’s vicious beating of Jake, and the narrative momentum in the novel provided by the murder is lost by it occurring 25 minutes into the film. The book uses Brandt’s father as the repository of the all-important documents, but in the film Lena has them, making her level of knowledge clear (and increasing the cruelty too in reducing the allocation to slave workers from 1,100 calories in the book to 800 in the film).

  Jake, like a typical noir detective, is at the mercy of forces beyond his control (as Teitel says at the end, “You’ve been wrong every step of the way, why stop now?”). However, it is as if Soderbergh cannot allow his hero to be the complete “patsy” as Tully describes him near the beginning; and in the second half of the film, Jake miraculously discovers the ability to pursue a line of investigation with vigor, even though he misses the biggest clue of all in the shape of Lena. Jake is denied another female sidekick (the photographer, Liz, in the novel) to whom he might show his more emotional side, and although Blanchett can exude glacial charm, it is hard to imagine Lena and Jake in love, in the past or now. Thomas Newman’s score, which epitomizes the somber and elegiac mood of postwar construction, reflects this sense of being frozen in emotional aspic, ending fairly much where it began. The oft-repeated line of dialogue “there’s always something worse” serves to deny characters much empathy as the viewer is just waiting for the next betrayal.

  Rather than the book’s focus on revealing the atrocities of the Nazi rocket science program, in the film we have a conspiracy narrative based around the figure of Jake. He only gradually realizes how he has been used to lead the Americans to Emil Brandt, who can then be conveniently eliminated, allowing German scientists to be adopted by American military without the taint of Nazism. The film is quite a bleak view of political expediency with Breimer (Jack Thompson) slapping a newspaper into Jake’s hands at the end, underlining the link between the spy games in Berlin and the wider point about ending the war more quickly by using atomic weapons. The difficulty of winning the peace is an interesting subject, but Jake’s pseudo-film noir dialogue (talking of “the good old days when you could tell who the bad guy was by who was shooting at you”) seems strangely naïve from one who has reported on the war for several years.

  Expositional dialogue, placed in the novel in exchanges with Breimer, is shifted in the film to bizarre exchanges with a helpful barman (Tony Curran), so that Jake pours his heart out about background information and his thoughts and feelings across a bar (including his theories about a murder and secret files), while other customers mill around, to a minor character who has no bearing on the plot other than finding a place to stay for Lena later. In the book, no one really pays Jake any attention—he really is a lone investigator. The film plays up his importance, so that on leaving a room at the Potsdam press pool, several key players, including Sikorsky (Ravil Isyanov) Breimer, and Teitel, are all shown turning to watch his exit, implicitly hoping that he will lead them to Brandt. Later, Jake and Lena play out a strange prostitute-and-client scenario with Lena prepared to go through with it but Jake pulling back at the last moment, telling her to keep the money. The generic boundaries of a wartime film cannot accommodate changes in sexual politics in the intervening years to the present day without a sense of awkward compromises. The film struggles to find a space for a romantic relationship between Jake and Lena, and clearly once she has pulled a gun on him on the stairwell, this becomes even less likely. With a surviving husband, who is ennobled through his repentance and Lena’s support of him, to bring Jake and Lena together becomes impossible.

  There is also a sense of style being prioritized over plausibility, such as when Jake is allowed to wander by the site of where Tully’s body was found. First we have the cliché of miraculously finding a clue at the scene of a crime, then the introduction of some random violence as a guard hits him with a rifle butt, only to then have an expositional chat with Sikorsky while being stitched. The speed with which Jake, having wandered outside the Potsdam conference for a smoke, spots Tully’s body, at around two seconds of screen time, does seem ridiculous. Jake and Sikorsky exchange an eye-line match over the body and Jake gives a slight shake of the head, but rather than suggesting an investigator struggling to accept what he is witnessing, this just seems unmotivated and odd. Clooney’s reaction on being told that Lena was raped takes Soderbergh’s direction about muting demonstrative acting to an absurd extreme, as there is no visible reaction to what must be a major revelation to him. Emil is caught and stabbed by Gunther, whose role is translated from a principled policeman who saves Geismar’s life in the novel to a Russian stooge, ridiculously following Bernie and Jake to the records office, like a Marx Brothers routine, especially with his bald head and apparent lack of speech.

  Soderbergh’s stylistic experiments throw up several contradictions. The audience is not from the 1940s and may find it difficult to process genre signals from an era with which they are unfamiliar. The inclusion of Tully’s profanity, his brief but brutal sex scene with Lena, and the violence of his beating of Jake outside the club or his punch to Lena’s stomach—all this would have been unthinkable in films of this period. At times, the film feels like a wish fulfillment for Soderbergh, a fantasy of how his career might have been different if he had been part of the studio system in its heyday. However, this also includes a level of naiveté or nostalgia. The level of control that someone like Soderbergh has over his films (producer, director, editor, cinematographer, sometimes writer) is light-years away from Curtiz’s relatively restricted role at Warners. Films from the period may have used voice-over but usually with a central narrator and a motivated reason for any further fragmentation
, whereas here we drift from Tully to Jake to Lena and back to Jake.

  The adoption of stylistic limitations has the feel of a Dogme manifesto but for a single film project. The use of fixed 32-millimeter, wide-angle lenses prevents any reliance on zooming to create a sense of drama but allows the kind of composition in depth like when the camera pulls back slowly through the legs of spectators and then cranes up so we see Gunther exit the crowd in the background with Emil’s body still lying in the foreground (the clapping of the crowd providing an ironic commentary). Wider-angle lenses increase the scope of the frame so there is not the focus on cutting between close-ups and instead a more leisurely cutting style with actors walking into a space and delivering lines to another character within that shot, i.e., closer to the experience of everyday life rather than the rapid cutting between tight close-ups. However, there is also plenty of shot-reverse shot patterning (like the final exchange between Jake and Lena), stressing reaction shots, and the speed of cutting is still quicker than the average shot length of the 1940s.

  Rather than opting for how most films are shot nowadays with multiple cameras, generating plenty of so-called coverage, meaning the film is really created in the editing room, Soderbergh shoots most scenes with a limited number of cameras, selecting shots carefully, in theory making the performances more intense, exact, and purposeful. The fact that there are no extras on the DVD reflects that Soderbergh’s method of working produces fewer deleted scenes and a tighter shooting schedule but perhaps also suggests an unwillingness to dwell on the overpowering stylistic elements.

  The Good German has the slight feel of reality shows where participants willingly live supposedly realistically in a given historical period. Soderbergh’s search for lenses from Panavision without the modern antiglare coating, of the type used by Curtiz, may be interesting but throws up all kinds of contradictions about countless other areas of production, like cameras, makeup, or even the editing tools used, which do not derive from the period. Even if Soderbergh succeeds in making a film so much like an old one, an audience may wonder why not just watch that instead.

  Conclusion

  This book uses direct quotation from Clooney himself relatively sparingly. Perhaps rather cynically, interviews by stars and directors all too often seem little more than extensions of promotional material and a mythologizing of public personas. In relation to From Dusk Till Dawn, Full Tilt Boogie (Sarah Kelly, 1997), purporting to be an objective documentary on the making of the film, is actually filled with uncritical coverage of the cast and crew, who are allowed to present themselves as they wish, Clooney and Tarantino hamming it up as if in an improvised interview, although their responses are clearly rehearsed. It is not polished like a standard DVD “Making of-” featurette, but in a sense that is the point: it is parody of that kind of presentation, trumpeting its low-budget credentials. So we see interviews with a range of crew members, hear about problems with unionization and sand storms, with the overall feel of a video diary, trying to capture the mood on set.

  The films in this chapter are all challenging because of their mixed generic natures. Three Kings might have been placed here (or indeed in chapter 6 as Clooney’s first political film) but it seems more natural to put it in the next chapter as, in premise at least, it is a heist movie. Clooney seems increasingly drawn to films that seem to offer straightforward pleasures of a particular genre, only to offer something more challenging, such as Solaris or The American, or resist generic categories altogether, like Michael Clayton. It is in such films that we find some of his best work as an actor (see chapter 8).

  Chapter 5

  Heist Movies

  Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

  Jack Foley:

  It’s like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there’s this kind of recognition like you both know something.

  This is Clooney’s first experience with Soderbergh, with whom he would go on to work with on the Ocean’s franchise, Solaris, and The Good German, and also with a nonlinear narrative (a feature of all of these films). Clooney plays Jack Foley, an armed robber prepared to carry a gun, but the tone for his character is established from the outset. Here, it is wit and charm rather than brutality that is his preference, fooling the teller into handing over money with a plausible lie about a fictional accomplice holding a gun on someone. After a botched escape attempt in which Federal Marshal Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) just happens to be parked in front of the spot where an escape tunnel comes up, she and Foley are forced to get in the trunk of a getaway car.

  In the trunk, Foley and Sisco experience a scene of physical intimacy. It is strangely romantic, lit with a single-sourced red-orange light, with both characters facing the camera so that they can talk but we see only Sisco’s facial reaction or Foley’s admiring glance down the length of her body. It is also intensely sexual. Soderbergh’s camera adopts a male voyeuristic perspective, looking her body up and down and featuring a close-up of his hand on her hip. Foley, after several years being surrounded only by brutal males, is in forced close proximity to a character played by Jennifer Lopez, famous for her curvaceous body, in a short leather skirt. Having just returned from dinner with her father, she is made up smart in contrast to his grimy disguise. Like the repeated rear-entry sexual positions of Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996), such proxemics allow juxtaposed close-ups of faces while at the same time suggesting distance between a couple (she is a federal agent after all). This was the audition piece that Lopez read, acting out the scene with Clooney on a couch, and it is not hard to imagine how good that was. That said, it was difficult to get right, particularly since originally it was a six-minute-long take and there were over 40 attempts before Soderbergh was satisfied. Test audiences did not react well to the single take so the scene was reshot.

  The scene establishes a stylistic mode used for exchanges later in the motel bathroom and subsequently in the hotel. Lighting is limited, red-orange in color, and often from below (motivated from the table lamps, for example). The low-angle shot up out of the trunk of Foley looking down approvingly at her lying form is reversed later in the motel as she looks down at his naked form in the bath. Sisco remarks that she never really understood Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway’s lead characters in the film Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975): “You know, the way they got together so quick. I mean, romantically.” It is a personal thought about the progress of a relationship and obviously a self-aware reference (an actor talking about films), but it works here since their relationship is a slow-burn affair and this is certainly the touch paper.

  Like Jackie Brown (1997), Out of Sight is based on an Elmore Leonard novel from 1998 and adapted by Scott Frank, who had already scripted Elmore’s Get Shorty (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1995). There is a little bit of Tarantino-style riffing on popular culture and in-jokes like Michael Keaton’s uncredited cameo as Sisco’s unimaginative boyfriend, Ray Nicolette, directly reprising his role from Jackie Brown (Quentin Tarantino, 1997), and a mug shot of Clooney borrowed from his role as Seth Gecko in From Dusk Till Dawn. The later bizarre accidental death of White Boy Bob (Keith Loneker), shooting himself as he trips up the stairs, also feels like a nod to the accidental shooting in the car in Pulp Fiction. However, in the trunk scene Frank’s script puts both characters together in an unusual but dramatically plausible way, and neither character lists cultural references to appear cool or as part of a persona that is trying to be hip or ironic. There is a slight nod to the leatherwear of Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971) or Jackie Brown in Sisco’s wardrobe and also to the strong female detectives in such narratives. The scenes in which she trusses up Chino (Luis Guzmán) with a high-heeled foot on his back or smashes the arm of an abusive boyfriend of a witness later with a baton or the climax or where she hands over the house with a crop of dead criminals to the arriving backup, all underline her status. The birthday present from her father of a gun defines both her and the nature of their relationship, bound to law enfor
cement.

  The trunk scene is a clear updating of screwball conventions. The hero and heroine from different sides of the law are literally thrown into close proximity and learn some unexpected truths about their common humanity. Opposites attract, certainly, but there is more here. This is really pillow talk with the quick-fire banter suggesting an emotional as well as a linguistic connection. Neither character can talk like this with anyone else: Foley’s girlfriend, Adele (Catherine Keener), does not understand his coded language from prison, and Karen’s predictable FBI boyfriend, Ray, proudly wears a sweatshirt emblazoned with “FBI.” Her father (Dennis Farina, a real former cop) asks him if he wears one with “Undercover” on it to which he humorlessly replies, “No.” Foley is able to make her laugh, something no other character achieves.

  Often romance in heist movies struggles to be anything more than an unconvincing interlude between action scenes but here it is the whole basis of the plot. In following scenes, Foley and Sisco separately cannot stop talking about each other, and the narrative has the pair tripping over each other (a device going as far back as at least the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy). As a marshal, whose job involves pursuing fugitives, this is perhaps not surprising for Sisco, but there are domestic scenes—Sisco with her father and Foley with Buddy (Ving Rhames)—where they happen to see separate photos of each other in newspapers. In interviewing Adele, Sisco looks at framed photos of Foley, in a sense checking out a prospective partner. He has her wallet, giving the viewer visual information about her but also allowing him to call her at home. Outside Adele’s flat, Foley spots Sisco in his side mirror and cannot tear his eyes away from her rear as she drops her keys. Later in the farcical FBI raid, where the marshals stealthily approach via the stairs, he comes down the elevator. As the doors open to allow an elderly woman out, Foley exchanges a glance with Sisco, sitting in the lobby. It is a moment of recognition, not just of their identity but of their relationship as Sisco raises her radio to her mouth (her sense of duty) but says nothing (what her heart dictates). Foley is left standing there, giving a clumsy wave, cut off by the closing door, an awkwardness accentuated by his hopeless disguise of a red Hawaiian shirt.