At the end of 2022, I was looking for some kind of project to build the blog around some kind of theme. Inspired by a tossed-off comment on the Blank Check podcast, I decided to review the directorial career of George Clooney.
Over the first quarter of the next year, I went through his directorial efforts up until 2021’s The Tender Bar.
It was a bad idea.
Not a waste of time - it was interesting to write about Suburbicon - but I cannot see myself watching any of these movies again.
At the time, I ran out of juice. Those last couple of reviews are pretty short, and the gaps between them grew longer. By the end, I just ran out of stuff to write about.
There was no sense of growth or change.
Watching every movie I felt like I was hitting the same problems - the inability to focus on a single idea; the inconsistent tone; the underlying vacuousness.
Directing is about making choices, and it seemed as if in the early part of his career, Clooney the director never had a firm grasp on what he wanted to convey.
Looking back on what I can remember of his films, it feels like Suburbicon broke something in Clooney. In the movies before that, he was willing to try things, either in terms of scope, genre or style.
Suburbicon bombed, and with his next two films, Clooney appeared to retreat to something less ambitious.
Both The Midnight Sky and The Tender Bar are sombre dramas - they are not fully successful, but I was shocked by how relatively disciplined they were. Rather than a buffet of conflicting tones, genres and aesthetic decisions, these more recent films show a filmmaker who is trying to approach his subjects in a more straightforward way.
Well, you have to give him credit for trying, I guess.
This is the kind of ‘based on a true’ story picture that my grandfather would take me to.
I am totally partial to these kinds of sports stories - there is an in-built structure to an underdog story that should work every time.
Somehow, Boys in the Boat found a way to bungle it.
This movie has no angle on its subject.
It took almost the length of the movie for me to figure it out.
Before the race, the coach gives a speech telling the rowers to focus on what brought them here, and what they had to overcome.
That speech highlighted what was missing from this movie.
At no point do we feel the effort or the obstacles this team has had to overcome.
There are a few moments toward the end where the filmmaking chooses to get close to the athletes, to exaggerate and focus on the sheer effort and exertion of the race, but they are fleeting.
When they win, there is a swell of music but no sense of catharsis.
e get glimpses of potential conflict, and obstacles,, but the film is in no need to arrange them into a narrative that would resemble a story.
Lead player Callum Turner is a bit of a blank slate.
His story has some familiar building blocks - a poor student who takes to the rowing team because it will solve his financial troubles.
We see him living in an encampment and having to visit a soup kitchen, but there is nothing to pull at the heartstrings.
The Boys In The Boat is not a great movie. It is not even uniquely terrible.
But while watching, it made me want to circle back to the Clooney miniseries.
What I take away from watching his work is that George Clooney likes to direct movies. That is the clearest thing I can take as far as a personal modus operandi.
I think he has good taste as an actor and I can appreciate that he has ideas about the world.
There is a distinction between Clooney the performer and Clooney the director.
As an actor and movie star, I can lock onto Clooney. He is the smartest guy in the room with a hidden frailty. He is a fine comedian and willing to play supporting roles to others.
In contrast to his onscreen and public personae, as a director, Clooney projects nothing.
No themes, no specific tone, no sense of creative intelligence.
Watching Clooney the filmmaker, I was reminded of a quote about the boxer Archie Moore - at light heavyweight, he was a god, as a heavy weight, he was mortal.
This is not a new revelation but Clooney’s filmography reminded me that filmmaking is a human endeavour.
Not everyone is Spielberg (or, since it is Clooney, Soderbergh).
Some filmmakers do not have a firm idea of what they want to work on. They do not have a specific or defined vision.
Some filmmakers do not even have a specific incoherence in terms of a worldview or personal obsessions.
George Clooney is one of those filmmakers.
I don't even want to dismiss Clooney completely. Filmmaking is such a convergence of collaboration, subject matter and time.
He is still a big Hollywood star (a white, male one at that), so he will probably get more chances. The odds are in his favour that he might make something I connect with. He might even find a unique lane as a filmmaker.
I guess this is a long way of saying that I will be reviewing whatever he commits to next. Great.
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