George Clooney (24 page)

All three films work on the basis of presenting a series of difficulties, and then among potential solutions, fresh problems are thrown into the mix. In the first film, it is Danny's attachment to his ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), the current girlfriend of Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia), which is revealed as the driving force for the job. In
Ocean's Twelve
, Rusty's relationship to Isabel (Catherine Zeta-Jones), a cop, fulfills a similar function.

In hindsight, the success of the franchise seems a foregone conclusion but the first film had to establish the tone of interrelationships. The first shot of
Ocean's Eleven
shows Danny blaming his criminal behavior on being “upset” at his wife leaving him, setting him on a “self-destructive pattern.” On being asked if he could break away from this, he logically points out that his wife cannot leave him twice. The film establishes then that it is his story, the tale of a man with a troubled personal life but who can charm what has to be said seems a fairly pliant parole board.

Repeated shots of Danny show him fiddling with his ring (underlying his motivation to win back his wife), and we have a transformation of his rough-shaven appearance to the rising shot of him as a smooth operator, now clean-shaven, appearing on an escalator at an Atlantic City casino. He seems a compulsive risk taker and charmingly plausible liar, telling his parole officer on the phone that he has not been in trouble or drinking, although we have just seen him doing the latter. He is mostly dressed in dark, sober colors, often black, such as when he explains to Rusty the basic plan, and even when he is in a shop with Saul (Carl Reiner) is dressed in a stylish mustard-colored shirt. Strong underlighting at gambling tables, designed to make clients as attractive as possible, certainly plays up Clooney's facial features (also used later at the restaurant where he reveals himself to Tess).

The
Ocean's
franchise is a narrative featuring, and designed for, those beyond the 16–24 demographic, and we see the frustration of Rusty
(Brad Pitt) having to babysit spoiled pop stars, who cannot even follow the rules of poker. Although Rusty and Danny argue over criminal strategy here, Danny wins the argument, having substance behind his bluff (symbolically winning the hand), and can see how bored Rusty is in his present position. From the outset, there is an easy, relaxed tone to the banter between Pitt and Clooney based on their well-established personal friendship. They can credibly indulge in the kind of comic self-aware, self-canceling dialogue that is a feature of
Friends
, in which they both had cameo roles, and like in the TV series, as soon as the dialogue heads too far toward sentiment or cliché, there is a countermovement into self-deprecating humor. When Danny delivers his pitch for the plan as they wait for an elevator, Rusty reacts with “Been practicing that speech, haven't you?” to which Danny admits “A little bit. Did I rush it?” A similar style appears in
Intolerable Cruelty
, when Miles interrupts his own grandiose practice speech to a jury, implying a relationship between Donaly and the pool boy with “Did I go too far?”

Soderbergh uses a number of self-conscious camera placements or movements that draw attention to themselves, like the high-angle fixed cameras for shots of cars, such as in Rusty's open-top sports car near the beginning, the rotating shot that follows Rusty eating as the others watch a surveillance monitor, or the cropped shot of Clooney's face as he first surprises Tess in the restaurant (like Foley's appearance at Sisco's table in
Out of Sight
). The staccato effect used in the sequence where Danny watches Linus (Matt Damon) steal a wallet on a Chicago train has the effect of marking it as a digression from the main plot as well as allowing a momentary freeze-frame at the point of the crime and as Danny plants the invitation on him. Soderbergh also uses freeze-frames in the sequel such as the key moment when Rusty jumps out of the bathroom window on hearing that Isabel is about to make a breakthrough in the case.

The elaborate plots of the sequels are sometimes criticized, but the unreality of the whole enterprise is established in the first film with the theft of a device (handily mobile on its own trolley) that can emit an electromagnetic pulse similar to a nuclear bomb. The huge mock-up of the vault at the Bellagio seems unlikely, but as a metaphor for venture capitalism, the whole
Ocean's
series pushes notions of planning to an extreme. Here you really do have to spend money to make money. There is a dissolve from the fake to the real thing, but unlike Kubrick's maze in
The Shining
(1980), Soderbergh does not attempt an exact match. There are small attempts to capture the excesses of Vegas. Soderbergh frames Tarr watching TV coverage of the demolition of a hotel (reasonably modern but now seen as passé) as we see through the window behind him the real one fall.

It is perhaps inevitable that in a film, whose very title suggests a large main cast, Clooney should lose some of the main narrative focus at times. His foolish appearance on surveillance video (in meeting Tess) undermines his role as leader, from which he, albeit temporarily, has to step back. However, he remains cool throughout. The geekiness is outsourced to the ensemble characters, so Livingstone (Eddie Jemison) has the nerves, the Malloy brothers (Casey Affleck as Virgil and Scott Caan as Turk) squabble to the point that Linus begs not be left alone in the van with them, Tarr has an avalanche of British slang, and Reuben (Elliott Gould) personifies sartorial bad taste (complaining about Benedict's casino as a “gaudy monstrosity” while sporting paisley shorts, huge gold jewelry, cigars, and glasses). It almost leaves Danny and Rusty with too little to distinguish them (we never really see Rusty's supposed card skills in action).

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.

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.