George Clooney (21 page)

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.

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).

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 enforcement.

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.

In the motel, Foley wipes steam from the bathroom mirror, revealing his torso but also a sense that he is trying to work out his feelings. Meeting Sisco has disorientated him. Like a fantasy, she appears in his bathroom, as if willed by his thought. He appears completely vulnerable (perhaps part of what she finds attractive about him) but his pose is
broken as he opens his eyes and hauls her into the tub (shot from directly above) with Sisco clearly not resisting. We then cut to Sisco in hospital, subverting expectations and suggesting that this was actually
her
fantasy. Scott's script clearly describes this as her dream, but Soderbergh denies us conventional fictive markers like a wobbly screen, making his audience work to piece the narrative together.
⁶

Later in the hotel, we have a glimpse of the norm that Sisco has to tolerate as a sequence of well-meaning but uninvited men approach her. She looks at her reflection and the snow falling in the darkness outside (a computer-generated effect) as another man appears, his head cropped from view. The underlighting of the table, the fact that Foley is now smooth-shaven, smartly dressed, and not drunk, the close-ups of his eyes, and his romantic gesture of placing his hand over hers—all of these factors work in his favor. The following love scene is conveyed with freeze frames before we fade to black. From trunk to motel room to here, the relationship has progressed to a more complete consummation. There is also a use of flash-forwards to the love scene itself, like Nic Roeg's
Don't Look Now
(1972), intercut with shots of them still in the dining room to convey a disorientating sense of intense sensuality.

Particularly key is the earlier scene in Detroit, of the gang lead by Maurice Miller (Don Cheadle) minus Foley, carrying out a horrific attack on a rival dealer. Soderbergh gives the viewer only a few, brief distorted images of the violence and in a subsequent scene images of the police investigating the crime scene. The full power of the scene is writ large on the shocked and numbed expression of Glenn Michaels (Steve Zahn) on the gang's return, their nonchalance contrasting with his obvious petrification. Clooney's role then is of a criminal but is of a different league to the sadistic gang who brutally murder another prisoner, kill the victims of their housebreaking, and plan to rape Ripley's maid, Midge (Nancy Allen) in the final attack. Foley uses firearms initially only to threaten, and eventually chooses to fight back against the gang rather than take flight with Buddy and removes the bullets before confronting Sisco, provoking her to shoot him, albeit not fatally. The final scene with Sisco, revealed as the driver of Foley's prison van, leaves open whether she only wants to see him, talk to him, make him aware she will wait for him, or help him escape once more.