George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  On the plane ride they share, there are several instances of Clooney looking down and half smiling, as if at some private thought or joke. For some viewers, such gestures suggest sweetness and an inner life; for others, this may convey alienating smugness. Clooney’s subsequent films represent a struggle to escape the trap of such gestures, to embrace a wider emotional life of his characters and deny viewers the potential reading of his character as patronizing.

  Devoe’s first appearance in the film, after 22 minutes, presents him as a rule breaker, defending his arrest for a brawl, possible involvement with a prostitute, and inappropriate use of taxpayers’ money in negotiating with an arms dealer. He seems to be a character that has to apologize or at least explain his actions fairly regularly as he does so effectively. The lone hero, unorthodox but effective, again aligns him with the early and late Bond narratives. His military rank, lieutenant colonel, and the fact that he is in the Special Forces, may explain his arrogant self-confidence but makes him quite difficult to work with as he assumes command of any situation of which he is a part.

  In the sequence in Schumacher’s palatial Viennese offices, he enters the lair of the enemy with a Mission Impossible-style deadline, as a computer identifies (with unbelievable slowness) his face from a CCTV picture. This device appears in films like No Way Out (Roger Donaldson, 1987), which also uses a male lead as a high-ranking American officer, Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner), unmasking corruption, but here it seems quite contrived and more a prompt for Devoe to show his physicality in smashing Schumacher’s face in a table. As soon as violence occurs, Kelly becomes a stereotypical screaming victim who must be protected, although her reaction of terror is genuine because he has not told her his plan of action. Her skills are more refined, hacking into the computers; his methods are blunter, pulling a gun on the man and literally twisting his arm to extract information.

  He takes the wheel, driving the narrative as well as their car. The car chase evokes films like Goldeneye (Martin Campbell, 1995), which also features a car chase in the narrow streets of a European city, St. Petersburg, and shots of cars racing parallel to one another. It also looks forward to more recent films aspiring to the Bond mantle, such as The Bourne Identity (Doug Liman, 2002), which has a lengthy car chase in Paris between a single hero and apparently insurmountable opponents. The close shots of German automotive engineering, Mercedes and BMWs, and the frenzied pursuit down narrow streets evoke the headlong speed of Taxi (Gérard Pirès, 1998) in Marseille but especially Ronin (John Frankenheimer, 1998), also placing American stars (playing character with backgrounds in Special Forces) alongside European minor characters but decidedly European in location with car chases in Nice and Paris. Ronin also uses no musical accompaniment to these scenes, except at the end of its final chase, and some actors (including Clooney) perform their own driving or are at least visible in the car; i.e., stunt work was kept to a minimum.

  The car chase, prompted by the shooting of Dimitri (shown in in slow motion), uses fairly standard means to generate suspense, cutting between low-angle shots within the car and cameras placed in low positions on the front and back of the Mercedes to give the impression of headlong speed. Devoe has Kelly move to the front, supposedly for her safety, but it also allows Leder to frame both lead characters in an overhead two-shot. Slow motion is used for spectacular collisions, as when Devoe deliberately reverses back into one of the pursuing cars. The appearance of several identical black BMWs with their windows blacked out creates strong Bond-like associations, making the antagonists to the hero easily identifiable and equally expendable (all hanging out of the windows, waving pistols). Devoe’s car is not customized with the usual Bond gadgetry, but we are told by Dimitri that it is an embassy car, complete with bulletproof windows and armor plating, which presumably partly explains its indestructible nature. The chase reaches a climax in a public place but the reversing between two pursing cars seems excessively choreographed to be believable. Likewise, Devoe’s last-minute maneuver, supposedly causing his pursuers to crash into each other and skid into a restaurant, seems closer to the cartoonish stunts of The Dukes of Hazzard (created by Gy Waldron, 1979–85).

  In the brutal physicality of Devoe’s hand-to-hand combat and his driving (reversing into a crippled car four times), blending quick thinking with a preparedness for destruction (shooting through a bullet hole in his windshield, subsequently hiding down a side street in a brief hiatus in the chase, and firing his pistol in the air to cause panic in the square), his character feels close to the conception of a more muscular and brutal Bond. The forward and reverse tracking shots that follow Devoe as he walks up to the crushed car in which his friend’s killer is still alive, and fires twice into his chest at point-blank range, is both an act of revenge but also quite savage. This is a throwback to a conception of Bond, closer to Ian Fleming’s original character and seen in Sean Connery’s first appearance as Bond in Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962), in which he calmly shoots Professor Dent (Anthony Dawson) from a sitting position, and in Daniel Craig’s shooting of Dryden (Malcolm Sinclair) in Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006).

  The shot of the explosion behind Kelly and Devoe as they move away is an action movie cliché, featured in trailers for most Bond films, in other action movies such as Clear and Present Danger (Phillip Noyce, 1994) and even bookends the prologue sequence in From Dusk Till Dawn as the liquor store blows up. The opening of the following scene, linked by a slow dissolve, shows Devoe with his head in his hands, suggesting no triumphalism. They escaped with their lives and the information they wanted but at the cost of the life of a dear friend. Kelly’s shocked reaction reminds us that her environment is far from the brutality of military operations, and the admission “I’ve never watched anybody die” prepares us for her grief at the losses in the helicopter raid. However, the coldness of her delivery might also imply some judgment on Devoe and whether he really needed to kill the final man. Devoe’s next appearance, landing from a helicopter in uniform, underlines the different world in which he operates and serves to make any kind of romantic link with Kelly’s character nigh impossible and something the film does not pursue, beyond his dropping a comforting hand on her shoulder.

  The character of Dusan Gavrich (Marcel Iures) appears only some 38 minutes into the film, and his status as an embittered man is only really explained in the final chase sequence in New York. Having his character appear so late makes sustained engagement with him difficult. Gavrich’s claim, “I’m a Serb, a Croat, and a Muslim,” hints at the complexity of the issues here but also shows how the film is content to bundle troubling notions together. The murky politics of the West arming both sides in the Bosnian war is not really explored. In taking the role of the murdered diplomat, Gavrich appears to be taking the moral high ground, and yet as it seems he was behind the crime his status is compromised. The speeches that he makes at the end in the church seem unconvincing as we do not really see sufficient justification for his action. The re-creation of the sniper attack is effective but it makes his revenge personal, and yet his action is global in its implications. Even despite Kelly’s shrieked comment that Gavrich wants his death to “mean something,” the practical reality is that he could have exploded it from his hotel rather than the UN building and achieved the same effect.

  In the action genre, character development and particularly romantic entanglements only impede the main generic imperative: forward narrative motion. Therefore such elements are most often seen as weak spots, interludes in the action for audiences to catch their breath before the next piece of spectacle. Perhaps such delays are important but they are functional rather than emotionally engaging in themselves.

  As soon as the SWAT raid misses Gavrich at his hotel and the bomb is switched to a backpack, the film moves into more dynamic territory. Elevators just missing one another or handheld cameras tracking the progress of movement of a raid up to a room are familiar elements of the action/thriller genre, and filming in New Yo
rk is commonplace enough, but the frenetic passage through crowded streets on an apparently ordinary day is less common. Die Hard with a Vengeance (John McTiernan, 1995) takes the crosstown shortcut to ridiculous wish fulfillment levels, with Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) driving through Central Park, but here we have the handheld camera in forward and reverse tracking mode, creating the growing panic of Gavrich. We start to inhabit his point of view for a few shots, and slow motion conveys his growing sense of unreality, including a glimpse of himself and his wife with a child. Flashbulb transitions, more rapid cutting, slight wisps of smoke, and some shots at ankle height all create a sense of disorientation so that the explanation of his motivation, even this late in the film, is quite powerful. The practical difficulty of keeping a containment perimeter secure in a huge city and the moral dilemma of snipers unable to take a clear shot without civilian casualties are touched on but really only function as obstacles for Devoe (poring over a map on the hood of a car, instinctively taking charge) to overcome.

  The game of cat and mouse is complicated by the appearance of an accomplice, rescuing Gavrich from arrest. Here Devoe starts to act unconventionally, running across the roofs of cars, appearing in the blurred background, in the same shot as Gavrich for the first time, reflecting the two narrative threads, the hunters and the hunted, finally coming together. Cornered in an alley, Gavrich looks trapped but miraculously his accomplice reappears. Devoe, apparently reacting to Gavrich’s look, spins around and shoots his new adversary. However, the choreography of the scene is unconvincing. Whereas a similar scene in David Fincher’s Seven (1995) works through obscured or distorted vision in shadowy light, here everything is clearly visible. There is no reason why Devoe and Kelly survive simply by rolling beneath a helpfully placed step. The gunman could have just stopped and shot them. In Seven, it is the killer’s deliberate choice not to shoot the hero, which is revealed as important only at the close of that narrative; here, it just seems unbelievable.

  Devoe’s threat as a marksman is underlined as he shoots Gavrich once but allows him to escape to a nearby church. Kelly is the one who hears the choir, reflecting her observant nature, but in the church itself, Devoe (and by implication Clooney himself) displays protective and nurturing qualities in securing a child who is hiding under a pew. He represents masculine force but not in an indiscriminate manner.

  Gavrich dies, but by committing suicide he shifts the narrative into its final frenetic phase, in the unlikely defusing of a bomb: a Bond favorite from Goldfinger (Guy Hamilton, 1964) to Octopussy (John Glen, 1983), the latter also using a planned nuclear explosion to involve Western powers, albeit in a disarmament race. It seems a throwback to notions of crazed villains plotting world domination, and even with the adjustment here of Gavrich’s political motivation, derived ultimately from the personal, it seems no more convincing. There is a small nod to plausibility in having the making safe extend only to removing the nuclear element of the bomb and allowing Kelly a final piece of dramatic status by using her knowledge, but even though she does the thinking and the actual defusing, Devoe notes the time with plenty of tilting action of his head. The demands of spectacle (breaking glass plus and explosion), the triumph of good over evil (as Gavrich dies), and the saving of the heroine by the hero (if not in bomb disposal, at least in protecting her from the force of the blast) all seem close to generic cliché. As convention dictates, he hugs and she cries before being dragged off by rescuers dressed in protective suits. This action as he calls her name might be seen as a microcosm for the action genre, in which personal and especially romantic relationships are hustled out of the narrative by the generic concerns with narrative action.

  The final pool scene, reprising the opening but now with Devoe’s shoes coming into shot, marks the close of the narrative but leaves the relationship between the two fairly open. The film has not allowed space for it to develop, so although the final shot of Devoe standing at one end of the pool, declaring “I’ll wait” while Kelly finishes her 10 lengths, might be seen romantically, his rather ham-fisted way of asking her out for a drink suggests we have actually learned fairly little about these two characters during the film itself.

  Clooney is a credible action hero who is battling terrorists rather than vampires and acts on behalf of others more than himself, helping to save the world (or a sizeable part of New York), looking dashing in a military uniform, and (by implication at least) getting the girl. The film includes iconic shots like him standing astride a crate of explosives as a truck falls away and explodes. However, despite a few interesting shots (like the man trapped in the elevator with a SWAT team, shielding the eyes of his poodle from the impending violence), there is not enough here that breaks out from generic expectations to make the film particularly memorable. It is highly episodic, meaning that it is possible to drop in at almost any point in the narrative and pick up the thread of the action. This is in part because of the simplicity of the through line, find the bomb, but also it feels almost designed for dividing into bite-sized pieces on television. Goran Visnjic, who would go on to work on ER, appears as a border guard in The Peacemaker, albeit not sharing screen space with Clooney himself.

  The Perfect Storm (Wolfgang Petersen, 2000)

  “What was the final moment? What was the final, final thing?”

  —Chris Cotter in Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm3

  Twenty years earlier, Wolfgang Petersen directed a seminal piece of suspenseful television drama, Das Boot (1981), involving a tight-knit, all-male community at sea who were doomed to face a watery grave. While generically The Perfect Storm might be classed with other disaster movies and open to the criticism of being special effects-driven, it also examines the more philosophical issue of how men face the prospect of almost certain death and in this perhaps represents a small element of the human condition: how does one exist in the knowledge of one’s impending mortality? The opening subtitle establishes time and place precisely (Gloucester, Massachusetts, Fall, 1991). We are in a specific fishing community and focus on one particular sword boat, the Andrea Gail, and its crew, particularly its captain, Billy Tyne (George Clooney).

  There is a slight touch of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) in the intrusion of external circumstances to scupper the fishing exploits of an intrepid hero. Here it is not a single shark that eats the catch but a huge haul of fish that must be partly abandoned due to a convergence of storms. The film opens with a series of dissolves over the names of dead on the wall at City Hall. The prominence of 1918 might suggest the First World War, but further shots underline that the losses stretch back much further. The final dedication refers to the 10,000 Gloucestermen who have died since 1623.

  What is something of a delicate topic, given the outcome of the narrative, is the element of blame, if any, that should attach itself to Billy Tyne. Clearly, his living family were concerned that his memory not be besmirched; but in the context of the film, the idea that an experienced fisherman would not know the risk that he was running, especially given the technical support open to him (via detailed radio and TV weather reports), and the simple fact that he is alone in proposing going out, not just to Sable Island but beyond, to the Flemish Cap: all this raises questions about the judgment of the captain. In the film, this is portrayed as strength of character and a stubborn unwillingness to accept their fate, with which he draws the rest of the crew along, but it might equally be seen as an example of hubris and poor judgment. According to Sebastian Junger, whose dramatized account of real events formed the basis for the film, the real Billy Tyne “truly loved to fish” and the script does capture some of that sense of passion as well as raising the question whether that can cloud judgment at times.4 On the other hand, the confluence of storms is exceptional, Tyne is experienced and has ridden out rough seas before, and at bottom, he needs the fish. There is the strong sense throughout of the need to be respectful to the memory of those who died not just in this disaster but of the many, many others who have g
iven their lives from this small, tight-knit community.

  Like Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), the careful husbandry required by fishing is underlined and a respect for such traditions is engendered by dissolves, of iconic images of fish being landed and nets and boats both being cared for. Petersen portrays boats returning to harbor as the source of communal joy, craning up to show friends and family rushing to greet those returning, already elevating the fishermen to the status of returning heroes. The centrality of this action and where it takes place, within sight of the Crow’s Nest, sets up the key dynamic of the film: leave taking and returning (or not). The film touches on how communities live in the face of repeated separation and possibly death. The dissolves used as the two boats, the Andrea Gail and its rival the Hannah Boden, steam into harbor, along with James Horner’s swelling theme, establish a strong elegiac tone, which pervades almost all of the film, except the action sequences. The theme returns as the crew walk out to the ship a couple of days later, like heroes going off to war but with a strongly elegiac feel, since audiences probably know the true story that the film is based on and therefore realize they are watching the actions of dead men. Petersen uses the number and nature of the greeters to establish the lives of his main characters. Chris runs to Bobby Shatford (Mark Wahlberg) and jumps into his arms, Murph (John C. Reilly) stands awkwardly looking around without obvious family, and Tyne is the last to leave the boat, foreshadowing his eventual demise.

  Clooney’s character, Tyne, is established as respectful of the lives of others, taking exception to the bluntness of owner Bob Brown (Michael Ironside) who only makes jibes about Tyne’s poor catch rather than showing respect to a fellow seaman who died on board the Hannah Boden while at sea and whose body is unloaded at the quayside. The presence of Brown is important to establish the different pressures Tyne is under: economic (his catch is small and potential profit is drastically eroded by deductions), professional (if he does not improve, Brown will offer his boat to another), personal (his rival, Linda, has outperformed him), and almost spiritual (his sense of self-belief that he will find fish, reflected in the decision of Douglas Kosco (Joseph D. Reitman) not to go with him, which Tyne takes as a loss of faith in him personally.