George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  On the rooftop, the absurdity of the situation becomes even more apparent. Despite cloaking himself in the aura of a teacher (“I have a class to teach”), the only wisdom that he has to impart involves a handheld circular saw, which you have to crank for around three hours to make a small hole (supposedly) in the side of the safe. He will have nothing to do with explosives (possibly the source of his wheelchair-bound existence) and hails his method as the cleanest if not the quickest (“It’s the method I was taught. It is what I believe in.”). He appears once more at the funeral home in a laughably bad disguise as a Hasidic rabbi, which supposedly prevents him being identified by Detective Babitch (David Warshofsky) who is watching the scene from a car across the street. The irony of Jerzy’s own appearance seems lost on him as he calls the others idiots for being so easy to identify.

  Instead of his usual role as the leader of a heist, here Clooney is the possessor of supposedly specialist knowledge, but in keeping with the lack of talents in the rest of the group, he is as much a loser as they are. He is a joke to local children who tease him by shouting that the police are coming, sending him into a blind panic, throwing a sheet over the safe. His spluttering at the children (“fucking midgets”) is funny but also underlines his impotence to do anything about it. The clap he gives in the projector scene at being offered a part on the team is partly the stupidity of the offer (given his wheelchair-bound situation) but also his frustration at his own situation. Jerzy is an absurd version of Jim Byrd from Confessions, also advising the group to “Watch your back,” and Seth in From Dusk Till Dawn whose tattoos, which had been visible on his neck, are subsequently revealed more fully by his wearing just a vest.

  Clooney was the last cast member on board, and his scenes act as additional rather than central material to the plot, which could function without them, but nonetheless he adds some comic depth in keeping with the tone of the whole. Clooney seems absent from the DVD extras package, which is perhaps logical given his small on-screen time, and then he appears behind the camera, pulling faces at the Russo brothers during their segment. It seems that both he and particularly Soderbergh, who first saw their film Pieces (1997) at the Slamdance Festival, were drawn by a style, sensibility, and method of working (Joe is also an actor but they operate as two heads speaking with one mind) that seems like a younger version of the Coen brothers.

  The Russos acknowledge the debt to Big Deal on Madonna Street/I soliti ignoti (Mario Monicelli, 1958) at the end of the credits. The Russos maintain small elements in the film that hint at the Italian source material but there is really only a residual element (casting an Italian, Jennifer Esposito as the maid, Camilla), and the terminology, which seems drawn from a blend of gangster movies and adolescent slang, is altered a little (their dream crime, their “Bellini,” and the notion of a patsy to take the blame for a crime, a “Mulinski”; Riley, played by William H. Macy, later claims the Bellini is starting to look like a disaster or “Kapuchnik”). The much-used term “Bellini” does not appear in Monicelli’s film (he uses “Peccora” or sheep for “Mulinski”) and stems from a local Collinwood story about a man, given a job at the Federal Reserve, who mysteriously disappeared (presumably with some of the money he was responsible for incinerating). Some names are changed slightly (Peppe becomes Pero) and some are shifted to make a more subtle allusion (Michael Jeter’s character is called Toto, the stage name of the actor playing Clooney’s part in the original).

  There is a running use of anachronistic jazz/Italian music, but for many audiences this may not place the film in an exact chronological period but signal more an indefinite mythical past.

  Stylistically, the Russos allude not so much to the specific era of the original version but further back to the era of silent film. The credits with their use of bordered intertitles, the opening four-shot without dialogue and all the characters facing outward to the camera, and the imposed graininess on credits for the DVD featurette all feels very like the aesthetic of the period 1895–1905. The film is punctuated by fairly simple visual gags, especially in the climactic robbery where they drill through a water pipe, breaking into the wrong room, and then blow themselves up by lighting a faulty gas cooker. However, this latter mistake does not lead to bloody injuries or loss of limbs, just cartoonish blackened faces.

  Cosimo is typical of how laughable the group is. He is first seen trying to steal a car while eating a cheeseburger, catching his scarf in the door, setting off the alarm, being unable to start the vehicle, and being too slow to escape arrest. Pero (Sam Rockwell) easily tricks him into revealing the details of his Bellini; Cosimo escapes prison only due to a guard having a heart attack; and he himself dies pathetically, walking in front of a tram. Throughout the film, he calls everyone a “son of a whore” but at his funeral is ironically revealed to literally be one himself. Riley, who is seen carrying his newborn baby around for most scenes, steals a camera (also in Monicelli’s film) by using a fake arm but then later has his arm really broken by the man he stole from, appearing on the night of the robbery full of tranquilizers. The practicality of Toto (Jeter) coming on a physically demanding break-in is absurd from the outset, and predictably his frailty and fear of heights lead to him being carried across the rooftops, losing his pants on the way. The absurd appearance of Leon (Isaiah Washington, who had worked with Clooney in Out of Sight) with his cravat, pipe, bow tie, and even sporting a dressing gown in his first scene although it takes place outside, apparently on wasteland, underlines his ridiculous pretentions to some kind of Oscar Wilde-style persona. Pero is planning a boxing career, although he is downed with one punch, and his line in seductive power is more persuasive for its energy and irrepressibility than for its coherence (he tells Camilla that he has a “degree in … learning” and explains a kid spitting on his shoes that this is just a game they play with each other).

  It is an inverted version of Ocean’s Eleven, where each member of the team has no particular criminal aptitudes at all, and the narrative details their step-by-step progress toward failure (which we see from the very opening shot, to which we return at the end). The supposedly well-planned job is composed of a series of pratfalls, closer to the style of a Laurel and Hardy comedy. The coal chute entrance only leads to a pool of drainage water, Toto falls off the ladder onto Pero’s face, Leon’s elaborate attempts to cut a circle out of a window make the whole pane shatter, and Riley’s plaster arm knocks over a statue that then lands on Toto’s foot. There is an anachronistic feel to the crime being proposed, robbing a safe, but there is no brutality or technological know-how on show here as there is in the final house-breaking sequence in Out of Sight.

  In this, Collinwood feels a little like Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket (1996), which also features ordinary characters dreaming of criminal greatness but with no ability to plan or execute even the simplest of crimes, as well as the accompanying musical selections of Mark Mothersbaugh. The pause in the climactic job in Collinwood, where the would-be robbers sit down and take turns explaining what they would do with all the money, money we see they are never going to gain, is typical of the dreamers that people Anderson’s films. The final shot of the film, the sign welcoming visitors to the town with the sarcastic afterthought scrawled beneath “the Beirut of Cleveland,” also feels like a flipside of Syriana, which in some senses normalizes that region.

  Actors of the caliber of William H. Macy would not waste their time on poor scripts, and although Clooney or Soderbergh are not credited as writers, they both worked with the Russos for several months on its preparation. The jokiness of the DVD extras with Sam Rockwell interviewing cast and crew, the rap “Your mother’s a whore” complete with video, and the shots of the cast (including Clooney) playing basketball reflect a film that appears to have been fun to make. The numbers (a budget of around $12 million and a U.S. gross of $340,000) might cast such fun as a little self-indulgent or suggest that a well-made film, based on a strong original, was not marketed strongly enough to reach an audience who wo
uld appreciate it.

  Conclusion

  I love it when a plan comes together.

  —Hannibal (George Peppard) in The A Team

  The attraction of the Ocean’s franchise for the actors concerned is fairly clear. The chance to work with a large number of A-list actors, a director known for his unconventional indie work, and a remake of a famous title (if not a great film) all give this, like Danny says to Rusty near the beginning of the first film, the appeal of something that has “never been done.” After the audience reaction to the first film, they become part of a commercially successful franchise, playing characters that are mostly likeable as well as able to enjoy the kind of lifestyle they are portraying with actors who are also their friends. The characters of Tess and Isabel, dropped without much ceremony in the third film, and the starchy but fairly easily distracted Sponder (Ellen Barkin), seem additions rather than central to the franchise. The group, like the original Rat Pack, is predominantly male. Basically, women are present only as a one-trick scam (Tess as Julia Roberts), for slapstick (Sponder, amorously befuddled by drugged by Linus’s hormone patch), or as a force of law and order, which can be charmed or corrupted (Isabel, who joins the gang at the end of the second film).

  There is no real attempt at character development. As Rusty says to Saul in the first film, “Guys like us don’t change. We stay sharp or we get sloppy. We don’t change.” This means there is a slight feeling of diminishing returns across the three films. There are only so many times an apparent threat can morph into a fellow conspirator before viewers suspend their disbelief that the planned heist will fail. Using Linus’s mother (as the fake U.S. Marshal, Molly Star) in the second film and his father in the third (as an FBI officer) stretches things a little. Across the three films, the whole dream of Vegas seems to shrink. Waxing nostalgic about Reuben and how the town has changed, Danny states, “They built them a lot smaller back then,” to which Rusty ruefully observes, “They seemed pretty big.”

  However, much of the appeal of all three films is not in the actual gaining of money. None of the films go as far as criticizing Vegas as a symbol of excessive luxury, but the second film does underline that once obtained, unlimited wealth does not guarantee happiness. Like a murder mystery, the prime pleasure (for both characters and audiences) is in considering a series of apparently impossible problems and producing a sense of catharsis in the audience that arises when those obstacles are overcome.

  There is something purposely anachronistic in the style, the music, the language, even the portrayal of violence in the films. Unusually for this genre, there is absolutely no sight of blood, and the worst that is likely to happen if a plan fails at any point is arrest and detention (as seen in the second film). As Roman says, Rusty and Danny are “analog players in a digital world.” When Toulour pulls a pistol on the rooftop at the end of Ocean’s Thirteen, Linus says with incredulity “a gun?” and it is revealed to contain no bullets. Despite the money at stake and despite talking about the levels of protection, the SWAT team of the first film never fires a real shot, Reuben’s flashback about the most recent failed attempt to rob a Vegas casino freezes as the police presumably shoot the man down, the man who is bundled out in Ocean’s Thirteen is rammed into a machine out of sight of camera, and although featuring Al Pacino in the third film, there is no sense (unlike his gangster characters in The Godfather or Scarface) that he will order a hit in revenge. Although the plot opens with his reneging on a promise to Reuben, it closes with him apparently (and rather unbelievably) willing to accept his loss, simply because any potential killers “like me more than you” and Bank “shook Sinatra’s hand.” The whole Ocean’s series operates under quite different generic imperatives than Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) with its underbelly of extortion and murder. The notion of a bloodless, stylish crime caper (especially the second film with its European settings) evokes a bygone era of films like The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969), where planning and cool is privileged over technology and brute force.

  Chapter 6

  State of the Nation

  Governor Mike Morris: Integrity matters.

  —The Ides of March

  Fail Safe (Stephen Frears, 2000)

  This live Cold War TV drama dramatizes the consequences when, due to a technical fault, one group of planes cannot be recalled and go on to deliver their payload to their given target: Moscow. Although there is no longer a technological need for a live performance, clearly, from an actor’s point of view, the sense of danger and the ability to play a character in linear fashion without the retakes of film are worth considering, and certainly the cast that director Stephen Frears attracted all seem enthusiastic about the idea. The performance happens in real time, and in rehearsal Frears gave notes akin to working in the theater. However, in several other ways, it is different. The whole cast is not on a single stage or within direct eye contact with one another, and a key dramatic element, the presence of an audience, is also missing.

  The production was split between two huge sound stages at Warner Brothers, and we cut between the four main settings (the presidential bunker, the Omaha War Room, a New York think tank, and the fatal cockpit of the Group 6 bomber, piloted by Grady) and a brief introductory scene in the bedroom of Lieutenant Blackie (Harvey Keitel), which establishes where his wife and child will be later on that day. Thus, with at least three different sound stages being used, it becomes less of a linear performance for the actors and more of a linear accomplishment for the producers; that is, it is arguably more of a technical accomplishment than an artistic one. Much is made in interviews about the edginess of performing live, and certainly the possibility of making a career-defining mistake in front of millions of viewers could be said to add this. However, if watched on DVD, the viewer already knows that the performance worked, so much of the edginess has gone.

  The historic nature of the enterprise is hailed by Walter Cronkite as “a giant step” in the introduction, and certainly it is true that CBS had not entertained such an idea for nearly 40 years. However, as with Soderbergh and The Good German, it is debatable whether the adoption of anachronistic technology in itself delivers art that is any more profound than using state-of-the-art means. In retrospect, it feels more like the attempt by television to market a gimmick, one that marks it as distinct from movies certainly, but still, in 2000, a gimmick. It becomes a technical achievement and a must-see TV event of that particular season.

  The second question here perhaps is why remake this particular film in a similar form to the original with the same title, scriptwriter (Walter Bernstein), and fundamentally the same narrative and audience: Lumet’s 1964 version with Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau was clearly made for American viewers (rather than primarily European or other territories). Therefore Clooney is not updating a classic in technological or scripting terms. It seems more of an homage to one’s own cinematic heroes for a new generation, unfamiliar with the original film or with the nuclear issues that may have receded a little from public consciousness since the flashpoint in the early 1960s but that still remain relevant (underlined by the intertitle at the end). Rather than the robots and spectacular fight sequences of the Terminator series, this film, which explores the same basic thematic territory (men create machines that they cannot recall, leading to nuclear strikes), the emphasis here is on tense dialogue exchanges and looking up at screens depicting the inexorable route to catastrophe.

  On the DVD extras, Richard Dreyfuss (playing the president) talks up the educational value of the film in dramatizing the absurdity of the Cold War for current and future generations, who find it hard to understand. Certainly there is a dated feel to the president’s offer to bomb New York as a sign to the Russians that the Moscow bomb is a mistake. Above the absurdity of the ideology of mutually assured destruction, it also taps into notions of post–Second World War moral strength. It is hard to imagine any president of the modern era having the courage to make such a decision. There is a nostalgic elemen
t here too for a pre-Nixon era, when the president seems honorable and will trust certain key individuals, often those he has known for a long time, like Blackie, who serve their president without question, even to the point of dropping an atom bomb on New York (where his wife and daughter happen to be visiting a theater). The presidency is let down by hawkish advice and a flawed system, rather than being corrupt in itself.

  Clooney’s role, Colonel Jack Grady, seems one that dovetails with his ER persona, engaging in banter with his son (also looking forward to Michael Clayton in this respect) and apparently sensitive to the obsessions of youngsters (here talking about a chameleon). However, once in the air it is the intransigence of Clooney’s character (or the mindlessness of his training perhaps and the ideology that it represents) that leads to the bomb being dropped on Moscow, despite a personal plea both from the president and from his own son (a scene using Grady’s wife is cut from Lumet’s original), including the private joke with the ironic punch line “Only fools are positive.” The cutting in the cockpit is progressively closer with early dialogue obscured by oxygen masks. The masks are then removed and we have close-ups of the three pilots (one played by Clooney’s longtime collaborator, Grant Heslov), shifting to extreme close-ups of three pairs of eyes during the appeal by Grady’s son.

  The production still represents a strong viewing experience. The usual, and often lazily employed, means to inject suspense into TV drama (rapid cutting between close shots, underscored by upbeat music) are dispensed with here. A relatively small number of cameras focus on wider shots, often two-shots, for longer periods of time than average shot lengths today with very little movement, and there is no music (even at the end). The production picks up little points of style from the past, such as the old-style Warner Brothers logo at the beginning or the reading of actors’ names over footage of them at the close. The fade to black between acts every 20 minutes may feel odd but the original transmission would have had commercial breaks too.