Like in Confessions and Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney takes a peripheral role, partly to ease the pressure on his own direction. The prime focus is on press secretary Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) and his moral trajectory from young idealist (“nothing bad happens when you’re doing the right thing”) to ruthless blackmailer. In the process, it emerges that Morris has had a brief affair with an intern, Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), clearly paralleling events in the Clinton administration. As journalist Ida Horowicz tries to warn Meyers that as a politician, Morris “will let you down, sooner or later.” It is perhaps the depth of Meyers’s naiveté, verging on hero worship, that makes the tarnishing of Morris’s image much harder for him to accept. Grubby behavior in one arena is reflected in another: campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) rejects Meyers as a potential defector once his cover is blown, Horowicz threatens to reveal a meeting Meyers had with Duffy unless she is told some insider gossip, and Meyers loses interest in Molly, failing to meet her after dropping her off at an abortion clinic. Finding Molly’s dead body in a hotel after her despairing suicide, his first reaction is to steal her phone to cover his tracks.
This is the first time Clooney has played a public figure and perhaps echoes why he routinely refuses any suggestion that he himself could pursue a political career. A little like Archie Gates clutching a ceasefire agreement in Three Kings, Morris claims in a TV debate that “my religion is a piece of paper: the Constitution.” Morris’s moral platitudes delivered to a crowd at the end are seen as hollow, but so too is Meyers’s position. Molly is sacrificed by his character but also perhaps by the narrative as a whole. Her pursuit of Meyers (though pregnant), her need for money despite coming from a rich background, whether her death was deliberate or accidental—all need a little more detail to be wholly convincing. The object of his admiration (Morris) is diminished but so is his own integrity, something trumpeted in Morris’s campaign rhetoric. Meyers’s blank stare into the camera at the end of the film reflects not only the opening scene where he is testing a microphone with phrases about religion that he appears (at that point) to believe in but that by the end he has literally become the thing he despised only a few short weeks before.
Clooney’s interest in politics extends beyond the screen. In September 2006 he addressed the UN Security Council to urge greater action over the disputed Darfur region of southern Sudan. He traveled to China and Egypt in December that same year (and again with friend Don Cheadle in 2008) to press leaders there to exert any political influence they may have over the same issue. Clearly, any celebrity making political statements is open to criticism of being ill-informed and just following the latest trend in supporting a given cause. To his credit, Clooney has stuck with this single cause for a long time, informing himself better so that he can answer detailed questioning and agreeing to interviews even when he does not always have a new film to promote. It is also an expression of his dissatisfaction with entertainment-based news (although ironically he is part of that) and an attempt to focus on a story with some hard visual information to back it up. This was taken a stage further in 2010 when he agreed to be involved with the Sentinel Satellite Project, which used high-quality satellite photography to record any potential war crimes that might be taking place in southern Sudan.
Chapter 7
Spies Like Us
It was as if the CIA lived in a parallel universe.
—Bob Baer1
Clooney certainly seems interested in the intelligence work of shadowy government departments from the more realistic Syriana to the openly absurd Men Who Stared at Goats. In Confessions, as Jim Byrd he plays a role that politically he may reject but is dramatically interesting. Byrd claims that killing enemies of the state for the CIA represents “honest work for good pay” but we do not really see this. The precise reasons for the assassinations are never explained to Barris or the viewer, we do not see much evidence of the gratitude of the nation, which Byrd promises, and the training the wannabe killers receive seems amateurish and played for laughs. Instructor Jenks (Robert John Burke), as a tyrannical drill sergeant, accidentally injures a volunteer in demonstrating combat skills. Barris himself draws cartoons, while supposedly taking notes on torture techniques, and then is seen later boarding buses with all the other trainees, dressed as stereotypical spies in identical long coats and hats.
In Three Kings, Archie Gates, a senior intelligence officer, recognizes the attraction of weapons-based technology, the frustration at missing the experience of combat, and the immaturity of many of the men he is surrounded by, reflected in comments such as, while looking at the map, “That’s what makes Special Forces so bad-ass: we got the best flashlights.”
Clooney’s tiny cameo in Spy Kids (Robert Rodriguez, 2001) as chief of OSS (Organization of Super Spies), Devlin, indulges in tongue-in-cheek playing with conventions of the genre, a tiny strip covering his eyes, supposedly to disguise his appearance. The strip moves as Devlin speaks, but in a neat visual gag he picks it off his face. Several features of other Clooney roles coalesce here. He is dressed in a dark, sober suit and holding a position of authority but deflates that with some wit.
Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005)
Danny Dalton:
Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm … Corruption is why we win.
“Syriana” is a genuine term used by think tanks in Washington to envisage a possible reshaping of the Middle East, but the film is at pains to point out the flaws in attempting to fashion countries in one’s own image.
Syriana has a complex structure with at least five different interwoven narratives. Clooney plays Bob Barnes, an experienced CIA operative, who has followed orders over many years without question but now finds that despite (or indeed perhaps because of) his loyalty and his knowledge of the complexities of the politics of the region, he is a dispensable liability. He is told to “go easy on the memos” by his political masters, who do not want to have to deal with genuine complexity or nuanced intelligence. They would prefer a top-down imposition of a reality they would like. As seen at his interview for a safe desk job, he is unwilling to avoid uncomfortable truths about Iran not moving in the direction of democracy, which is what powerful lobby groups want to hear. His experience in Beirut (the subject of dismissive laughter within his earshot even before he is called into the room) is seen as a clichéd way to boost a résumé rather than taking it at face value.
Bob is nearly always framed in isolation, walking with a cup of coffee or his battered case as his sole company, sitting alone waiting for Prince Nasir (Alexander Siddig) to be abducted, or, after realizing his misplaced loyalties, driving to meet his death out in the desert. He seems to have no friends among his coworkers, and his son clearly resents being moved around when all he craves is some normality. Bob’s wife is mentioned in passing by security consultant Stan (William Hurt), noting that any relationship with two individuals who have such a level of security clearance is doomed to failure, suggesting that a career in intelligence is largely incompatible with family life. Bob suffers for his loyalty, serving his political masters, believing in the greater good they represent. Gaghan denies us the easy pleasures associated with spy thrillers. There are no chases or clear-cut boundaries between good and evil with a climactic conclusion in which the hero defeats his adversaries. There are multiple story lines, which remain unexplained by a voice-over, shadowy characters who may be seen only once, and plenty of dialogue to which audiences need to pay attention.
Clooney, his face obscured with a full beard, shaved his hairline a little and put on 35 pounds for the part. We see him twice in long shot walking toward the camera, shoulders slightly hunched, his free hand by his side and jacket done up tightly to emphasize his portliness.
He often appears distracted, not looking directly at whoever is addressing him, like at the party and later when talking to his son, looking at a blurred figure partly off-camera, which suggests an air of habitual distraction, with the scene endi
ng with Clooney looking mournfully down and off left at nothing specific. He is a product of his job, unable to look straight at people or give straight answers. He claims his wife is only a secretary but that would be no reason why the family has to live in Islamabad. His son storms out, muttering, “Both my parents are professional liars.” When asked why they cannot live a normal life, Bob replies, “It’s complicated,” which might also be the tagline for the film. In both political and personal spheres, we are denied easy answers or indeed any answers at all. Threads of the narrative are often juxtaposed rather than literally interwoven. Bob sees Nasir only indirectly in the mirrored surfaces of the elevator in the hotel and face-to-face just before they are both killed by the missile at the end.
As a hero, Bob is problematic. His first sequence in the film closes with an explosion that he has engineered, killing some arms dealers in Tehran. Effectively, he is a hired killer. Later we see him in the grisly planning of the assassination of Nasir, coldly instructing Massawi (Mark Strong) to drug him and have him run over by a truck at 50 miles an hour. The business of carrying out state-sponsored murder should make him deeply unsympathetic but we also see more engaging traits. He is technically competent, e.g., testing the missile, appears morally concerned at the destination of the second missile (although seconds later we see that he had hoped to kill the recipient of both), and his action in peeking behind the curtain at what lies in the back storeroom could be seen as curiosity, bravery, or foolhardiness since he instantly has a gun placed at his temple. He is prepared to go back into Hezbollah-controlled territory at some risk to himself, withstand torture without giving up names, and most dramatically, at the close tries to warn Nasir of the impending threat to his life, although the drive out to the desert and the attempt to flag down a motorcade are somewhat at odds with his calm and considered demeanor up to this point. Like the act of leaving himself open to being snatched and tortured, he seems somewhat naïve. Whiting (Christopher Plummer) later states that “your entire career, you’ve been used” but Bob must know this. We might expect someone with Bob’s extensive intelligence experience, who had taken part in assassinations himself, to know about satellite surveillance and anticipate the final attack.
Rather than being treated as a hero who would not betray his political masters (close-ups of his fingers are the only sign of his torture), Bob is put under investigation and excluded from the intelligence community, electronically and then directly and personally as he is forced to visit Fred (Tom McCarthy), his boss, at his home. The cold calculation of Fred is clear in the climax where he oversees the missile strike. Killing Nasir and anyone else around him, including Bob, is just collateral damage. The speed and ease with which the CIA distance themselves from Bob and discredit him, blaming him for the opening attack (in which he was only following orders), and translate his independence of opinion into the notion of a loose cannon, reflect a deeply amoral organization, which appears to operate according to no higher moral standard (and possibly less) than those it is supposedly fighting (reflected in Dalton’s speech about the benefits of corruption). The final shot of Bob is in the photos that are carefully packed away as his desk is cleared. He is framed next to colleagues, who have now betrayed him. The voice-over from the video of the suicide bomber is heard as we zoom in to Bob’s face, suggesting that it is really he who “died of pure heart.”
The amoral machinations of oil executives, lawyers, and intelligence officers closely parallel one another, and the system of supposed regulation is hardly objective. At the beginning, Bennett Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) seems to be a man of principle and determined to expose corruption, but by the close he has revealed only sufficient levels of corruption to “give the appearance of due diligence” and takes his seat at the Oilman of the Year dinner, applauding alongside those who have exploited the situation dramatized in the film. The name of the winner, Connex Oil CEO Leland Janus (Peter Gerety), might well suggest the two-faced nature of the business. Corruption goes as far up the scale of command as anyone has the determination to look. Exploitation of the poorest in society seems like an acceptable price to pay for increased profit and influence. As a direct result of a corporate deal in America, thousands of miles away in the Gulf of Persia Wasim (Mazhar Munir) and his father are casually sacked by megaphone from a refinery and simultaneously threatened with deportation if they do not leave. Economic hopelessness contributes to radicalization of the young (Wasim and his friend are initially drawn to a madrassa by talk of food and the possibility of a respect and direction in their lives). Ironically, continuing instability in the region ultimately benefits the large oil companies by increasing the demand for their sought-after commodity.
The fact that Clooney’s role was first offered to Harrison Ford, who turned it down, might suggest that Syriana’s original conception was closer to Tom Clancy adaptations like Clear and Present Danger (Phillip Noyce, 1994), which features a CIA operative (like Clooney’s character here) fighting corruption and backstabbing within his own organization, including state-sponsored assassinations. There is a similar sequence involving a car containing the hero being driven into a terrorist-controlled area, with narrow streets and armed men looking down from rooftops, and which also turns out to be a trap, albeit not in an overt rocket attack. In the earlier film, we also have an explosion as the male hero Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford) walks away from it, a virtual cliché of the action genre (present in From Dusk Till Dawn too). However, in Gaghan’s film the explosion is initiated by the hero, and he is not blown to the ground but walks calmly away, his job done. It is the callous nature of international assassination that his film explores, not the need for sporadic explosions for little narrative purpose other than to increase the level of spectacle (we are also denied a climactic explosion as the screen just fades to white when Wasim’s boat strikes the Connex oil tanker). Action is unpredictable (the final missile attack) or directed in an unexpected direction (Bob rather than Nasir is snatched).
Like Noyce’s Patriot Games (1992), Gaghan includes a sequence of high-tech satellite tracking to dramatize an American covert strike (in the earlier film via an SAS attack on a Libyan terrorist training camp). There is something of a blend of the two scenes from Noyce’s two films with satellite footage (here even with a shot of a joystick, underlining the computer game comparison) intercut with multiple camera positions in and around the cars, including a sepia-tinted flashback of Nasir as he remembers seeing Bob in the elevator (almost like the cliché of life flashing before one’s eyes the moment before death). However, whereas Patriot Games includes jingoistic whooping, Gaghan’s film focuses on the human figures on the ground, before, at the moment of impact, and importantly afterward as Bryan (Matt Damon) staggers from his car to see the burning crater, which is all that remains of Nasir’s car. Gaghan shows us the personal consequences of a remote-control kill as Bryan stumbles off toward the city on a journey that will take him all the way back home to his wife and child.
Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies (2008) feels like a version of Syriana-lite. Set in the same part of the world, it also features a CIA character who put on weight for the role (Russell Crowe), a hero (Leonardo DiCaprio) tortured and about to be killed but miraculously saved, the use of surveillance footage portrayed from the American point of view like a video game, and a charismatic supporting role from Mark Strong as head of Jordanian intelligence. However, Scott’s film features a tedious number of scenes with characters talking into cell phones, a narrative that is fairly linear, albeit complicated, and a greater focus on intelligence gathering rather than wider concerns with oil and radicalization.
Although Gaghan, who had also written Traffic (2000) for Soderbergh to direct, received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay, the script is informed by Robert Baer’s nonfiction account of the U.S. intelligence services, See No Evil (2002). The character of Bob Barnes is a surrogate for Baer who also has a cameo in the film as CIA Security Officer #2. However, Baer describes himself as not
“in the least the sort of type-A personality who wanted to go out and charm the world,” which is usually seen as a key component of Clooney’s acting style.2 Clooney met Baer, but like Rockwell in Confessions, his performance here is less of an imitation than trying to capture something of his essence (easier perhaps since Baer is not a known personality like Chuck Barris). The book might almost be Clooney’s character’s backstory, explaining his discontent with the American intelligence services to the extent that Baer suggests that he could do his work best the further away he was from Washington politics. Like Clooney’s character, Baer is also an experienced agent and is the subject of a criminal investigation, instigated largely for political motives rather than any proven wrongdoing. He too is questioned by anonymous men in suits (Secret Service men rather than CIA staffers) who “could have passed for twins.”3
There are small references to events in the book. Baer’s use of a Mercedes taxi as cover in Beirut becomes the transport used by guerrilla groups in the film to carry Clooney’s character through the back streets of that same town when he foolishly returns, thinking he is safe. There is a single mention of a member of a Gulf royal family (without specifying which one) who tries to overthrow his cousin, who is the emir, but the detail of the rivalry between the brothers in Syriana comes from Gaghan’s script.4 Baer’s book describes the shady deals by businessman and lobbyist Roger Tamraz, whose amoral activities are reflected by any of the figures working for Connex. The CIA, in Baer’s book and in Syriana, is portrayed as a tool furthering the careers and private fortunes of the political elite, rather than protecting the American people. Baer’s book does not describe in detail the grassroots recruiting of specific terrorists but rather the dangers that such movements like this could pose to a toothless and unprepared CIA, which seems focused (in his view) on politically influenced big-name targets and reliant on electronic surveillance rather than the work of experienced case officers. Syriana plots potential consequences of these failings.
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