George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  After pulling off the job the cast stands wordlessly, looking at the Bellagio fountains in a moment of contemplation. Accompanied by Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” (also used at the pool party before they listen to Danny’s plan), the shot functions as a curtain call as the characters walk away one by one. In Ocean’s Thirteen, the team watches fireworks, with Sinatra’s “This Town” playing on the soundtrack.

  Ocean’s Twelve (Steven Soderbergh, 2004)

  Theoretically, this is a sequel with Benedict tracking down Ocean and his team and forcing them to repay his money in two weeks. However, it feels a little like the original film on steroids. There are more stars, more exotic locations (this time in Europe), and more elaborate heists, such as the notion of lowering the level of an Amsterdam house in order to steal some precious documents. The slight twist here is Rusty’s relationship with Isabel (Catherine Zeta-Jones), which seems fairly knowing from the outset rather than a credible cat-and-mouse element with a female investigator like Norman Jewison’s 1968 The Thomas Crown Affair. Like the introduction of a rival thief, François Toulour (Vincent Cassell), it tends to overcomplicate an already crowded plot.

  Quite why Danny’s gang does not all go into serious hiding is a little strange. Danny has changed his name and worked out a routine with Tess as what to do if found, but the others seem to be plying their old trades in familiar places (such as the brothers at a family gathering in Utah and Rusty still working in hotels). As Reuben says incredulously to a fortune-teller at the appearance of Benedict and his henchmen, “You couldn’t see this?” The film tends to play fast and loose with the role of Benedict. At the beginning, they are not so fearful of him that (except for Danny) they change identities. Then they do fear him enough to undertake any heist available in the body of the film but then at the end they openly defy him and give his money away.

  Life after the success of the first film seems an anticlimax. Danny starts telling a bank employee about being in a bank vault while it was being robbed, the implication being (particularly by Soderbergh’s use of jagged little jump cuts as Danny speaks) that everyday life seems dull by comparison. Even the montage of Toulour’s ultraluxurious lifestyle seems empty, prompting him into the egotistical challenge to Danny to see who is the best thief. It seems as if the plot itself is exhausted, digressing into a narrative of personal rivalry. It does, however, move the film toward the notion of robbing a single entity (a Fabergé egg) as a matter of personal honor and gives the film a lighter tone than genuine fear at being killed by Benedict’s men. However, some of the unity of purpose of the first film seems dissipated with bickering about the name of the original heist, which, unlike the naming scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, just seems more petulant than funny.

  Soderbergh’s preference for wipes as a transitional device between scenes (seen in the first film with the elevator doors closing on Danny’s face) becomes much more pronounced here, including a 1970s-style venetian blind effect, the hand of a clock, and a Charlie Angels-style wipe around the edge of the frame like a maze round into the center. In all three films, particularly in confined spaces (or spaces the director wants to suggest feel confined), Soderbergh uses hand-held camerawork, often in forward and reverse tracking shots following the progress of a character through a room (most obviously casinos but also Isabel in the Amsterdam house).

  There are relatively few elaborate postproduction effects, apart from the CGI shot to show the safe-cracking device being winched across the canal (a difficult shot to capture at night) and the hologram of the egg. Soderbergh uses sequences drained of color for any flashback sequences (the final explanation of the deal made with LaMarque), and as in the first film, freeze-frames capture key moments, like Isabel pocketing Rusty’s phone, and Rusty’s twisted expression of pained self-loathing at his elementary error. There are a couple of Kubrickian devices, like Soderbergh’s camera ghosting through walls in the opening scene, tracking to the new character, Isabel, in bed; and at a number of points in the film, he uses on-screen captions to underscore how many are left until Benedict’s deadline expires, although this seems a slightly desperate way to import a sense of urgency.

  As this is a sequel, there is the opportunity for an increasing sense of knowingness in the plot, with Linus (Matt Damon) pleading with Rusty for a “more central role,” which feels a little like Chico (Horst Buchholz) in The Magnificent Seven (John Sturges, 1960) with Rusty delivering the same judgment that Yul Brenner states to the aspiring member of the group: “You’re not ready.” It also perversely inverts Damon’s actual request to Soderbergh for a smaller role after his exertions on The Bourne Supremacy (Paul Greengrass, 2004).

  The additional characters in the sequel, Isabel (Zeta-Jones), Matsui (Robbie Coltrane), and Eddie Roman Nagel (Eddie Izzard), reflect the full diversity of British eccentricity (Welsh, Scottish, and English respectively). Although Coltrane plays his part straight, both he and Izzard (comedians as well as actors) bring a tongue-in-cheek element, particularly the latter, complaining about the cliché of Rusty having a sexy female assistant, only to be interrupted by one of his own.

  The scene with Matsui in which Rusty and Danny talk nonsense and then expect Linus to take his turn is presented purely for comic effect, and although it is funny, it adds to the sense of the creating an exclusive club, whose purpose is to tease those who are not fully accepted members. Danny’s “If all the animals on the equator were capable of flattery, then Thanksgiving and Halloween would fall on the same date” are followed by Linus’s effort, taken from the Led Zeppelin song “Kashmir” (1975). Later at the station, Rusty declares “It’s not in my nature to be mysterious” but then goes on to contradict this, claiming that he “can’t talk about it and I can’t talk about why,” leaving Linus far from impressed, giving a mock scared “Oooooh” (a shot frequently used in trailers). Linus is the only one who voices qualms about using the word “freak” and stealing from an agoraphobic victim, prompting the sarcastic comment, “Are you hosting a telethon we don’t know about?” The humor here has a slightly sharper edge at times, which in the first film was directed only toward those used to taking it. The mistake of Yen being sent in a bag to the wrong European city is superficially funny, and a subsequent shot of Yen bouncing for joy on his bed like a small child suggests that he does not seem to bear a grudge, but Virgil’s gag about him being a “bag man” could have had a more tragic outcome.

  The films are not afraid of dramatically dead time, which is often filled with substrata of neurotic patter, either between the Malloy brothers or more often surrounding Danny. Waiting for a train, he asks a series of characters how old he looks and more particularly whether he looks 50, making fun of the running joke that people generally take Clooney for older than he is, even though he is actually fairly close in age to Pitt. A similar scene has Rusty and Danny in a two-shot, sitting facing the camera, drinking wine, apparently watching Happy Days in Italian. Rusty delivers some soul-searching dialogue involving a girl and removing a tattoo and Danny’s only comment is “That guy doing Potsie’s unbelievable.” In Ocean’s Thirteen, Rusty surprises Danny in his hotel room watching Oprah, drinking wine and appearing to cry, although he claims he just bit into a pepper. For several seconds we just watch them, watching TV as Rusty also starts to become emotional, with a sniff. Partly parodies of men in touch with their feminine sides, it is also a reflection of the star persona of each man that can accommodate such moments.

  We have a glimpse of Clooney’s flat stomach as he coolly dresses, intercut with Toulour’s more energetic stretching routine (including some Capoeira), the full significance only becoming apparent later as we see him dance through the laser beams that guard the egg. By the time of The American (2010), it is Clooney who will show us more yoga-based routines, which help to keep both actor and the character he plays in shape.

  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.

  Ocean’s Thirteen (Steven Soderbergh, 2007)

  Rusty:

  Relationships can be—

  Danny:

  Oh yeah.

  Rusty:

  But they’re also—

  Danny:

  That’s right.

  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.

  Welcome to Collinwood (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2002)

  Jerzy:

  As a film, it’s a disaster.

  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.