Burn After Reading (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, 2008)

George Clooney in Burn After Reading

Cast: George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins, Elizabeth Marvel, David Rasche, J.K. Simmons, Oleg Krupa. Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki. Production design: Jess Gonchor. Film editing: Ethan Coen, Joel Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

One of the Coen Brothers' goofy dark comedies, and perhaps the darkest if not the goofiest, with a couple of fatalities that tend to take the levity out of the film. Mostly it's a showcase for the comic skills of some usually serious actors, with Brad Pitt the standout as Chad, an addle-brained employee of a gym who happens upon a disc that he thinks is full of government secrets he can sell to its owner for a reward. It doesn't work out well for him or anyone else. This is the Coens at their chilliest, with no one you much want to root for.

Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2003)

Intolerable Cruelty (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2003)

Cast: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Geoffrey Rush, Cedric the Entertainer, Edward Herrmann, Paul Adelstein, Richard Jenkins, Billy Bob Thornton, Julia Duffy. Screenplay: Robert Ramsey, Matthew Stone, John Romano, Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Cinematography: Roger Deakins. Production design: Leslie McDonald. Film editing: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen. Music: Carter Burwell.

Out of Sight (Steven Soderbergh, 1998)

George Clooney, Ving Rhames, and Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight

Jack Foley: George Clooney
Karen Sisco: Jennifer Lopez
Buddy Bragg: Ving Rhames
Maurice Miller: Don Cheadle
Adele: Catherine Keener
Marshal Sisco: Dennis Farina
Glenn Michaels: Steve Zahn
Richard Ripley: Albert Brooks
Chino: Luis Guzmán
Kenneth: Isaiah Washington
White Boy Bob: Keith Loneker
Moselle: Viola Davis
Midge: Nancy Allen
Hejira Henry: Samuel L. Jackson
Ray Nicolette: Michael Keaton

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Frank
Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard
Cinematography: Elliot Davis
Film editing: Anne V. Coates

When George Clooney left ER in 1999, there were some who thought it was a case of David Caruso Syndrome: a TV star whose ego had led him to think he had outgrown the medium that made him famous and was ready for movie stardom. There was evidence to support this premise: Clooney had done a disastrous turn as Batman in Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin (1997), a film that Clooney himself has disowned, and his forgettable appearances as a leading man with Michelle Pfeiffer in the romantic comedy One Fine Day (Michael Hoffman, 1996) and with Nicole Kidman in the thriller The Peacemaker (Mimi Leder, 1997) had done little to establish his credibility as a film actor. The one exception was Out of Sight, and among other things it cemented a working relationship with the director who had brought out the best in Clooney, Steven Soderbergh. The two have since worked together numerous times, with Soderbergh serving as director and/or producer, as well as mentoring Clooney's own directing and producing career. What Soderbergh found in Clooney was a kind of puckishness and vulnerability that has been further developed into broad comedy by directors like Joel and Ethan Coen in such films as O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and Hail, Caesar! (2016). But at the same time, Soderbergh helped Clooney figure out how to be a romantic leading man: His scenes with Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight have a kind of heat that Clooney never generated even with Pfeiffer or Kidman. That said, the romantic scenes in Out of Sight are probably the least entertaining part of the film. Much better are the scenes in which Clooney plays off against such wizardly character actors as Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, and Albert Brooks. Out of Sight puts such superb actors as Catherine Keener and Viola Davis in tiny roles, and also supplies unbilled cameos for Michael Keaton -- as Ray Nicolette, the character he played in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) -- and Samuel L. Jackson. It's wittily put together, with such teases as the opening sequence in which Clooney's Jack Foley angrily dashes his necktie to the ground before going across the street to rob a bank -- an action that isn't explained until halfway through the film, after numerous flashbacks and setting changes. It includes audacious surprises, such as the macabre-comic death of White Boy Bob, whose klutziness has been subtly hinted several times before he brains himself with a slip on the staircase. (Clooney's reaction to the death is priceless.)

Solaris (Steven Soderbergh, 2002)

George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Jeremy Davies, Viola Davis in Solaris

Chris Kelvin: George Clooney
Rheya: Natascha McElhone
Gordon: Viola Davis
Snow: Jeremy Davies
Gibarian: Ulrich Tukur

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Steven Soderbergh
Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem
Cinematography: Steven Soderberg (as Peter Andrews)
Production design: Philip Messina
Music: Cliff Martinez
Film editing: Steven Soderbergh (as Mary Ann Bernard)

The self -- or the soul, if you will -- is made of memories. Which is why disorders of memory, like Alzheimer's, terrify us so: Who are we if we don't have our memories? Relationships, too, are made by memories -- or marred by the absence of shared ones, as Andrew Haigh demonstrated recently in 45 Years (2015). But what are you if you are made of someone else's memories? That's the provocative premise explored in this version of Stanslaw Lem's novel Solaris, directed, written, photographed, and edited by Steven Soderbergh. When it was released, it was widely regarded by some prestigious critics as too slow, as "ponderous and dreadful," as "opaque, self-indulgent, and just plain goofy." I don't know if the critical reaction has shifted over the past 15 years, but I think Soderbergh's Solaris is a worthy companion to the more critically lauded Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky (1972). They attempt different things: Soderbergh a meditation on love, loss, and identity framed in the conventions of the sci-fi film, Tarkovsky a personal exploration of humankind's alienation from nature. If, as I tend to do, you prefer deeply personal filmmaking to Hollywood glossiness, you may prefer Tarkovsky, but I honor what Soderbergh -- a personal filmmaker working with Hollywood stars and conventions -- has achieved. The presence of George Clooney does tend to skew the film a bit, partly because Clooney, like all movie stars, has a fixed persona, and when he works against his type -- the handsome, wisecracking, invincible leading man -- people tend to feel their expectations have been frustrated and become dismissive. Would Soderbergh's Solaris have been critically better received if he had been able to cast his original choice for the role, the chameleonic Daniel Day-Lewis? Perhaps, but Clooney gives the role of Kelvin his considerable all, and I think it's one of his best performances. He's well supported by Natascha McElhone as Rheya, whose increasing horror at discovering she's not human but instead a being crafted out of Kelvin's memories of his dead wife is touchingly presented, and by Viola Davis as Gordon, who masks her terrors with a facade of toughness. We've seen Jeremy Davies do twitchy perhaps once too often, but it works here against the more controlled personae presented by Clooney and Davis's characters. Soderbergh also wisely keeps the identification of what (or who) Solaris is -- a planet or some kind of galactic sentient entity? -- one of the film's unsolved mysteries. To go too far into explanations would have sent the film into routine science-fiction territory. Cliff Martinez's musical score neatly supports the otherworldliness of the film.

Cinemax

Hail, Caesar! (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2016)

With Hail, Caesar! Joel and Ethan Coen return to Old Hollywood, the scene of one of their earliest films, the dark horror-comedy Barton Fink (1991), this time to give us what appears to be a cotton-candy fantasia on movie genres. But Hail, Caesar! seems to me the more successful film. In its sly way it reveals the grip that Hollywood myth and history have on our imaginations, using parodies of Hollywood genre films not just to send up their absurdities but also to show how deeply they color our dreams. At the same time, it explores Hollywood history -- the hold the old studios had on actors' lives, the role of publicity and gossip in creating and destroying stars, the interaction with politics during the Red Scare of the late '40s and '50s -- and combines it with the parody sequences to create a movie that turns out to be a parody of movies about The Movies, a genre that includes everything from the many versions of A Star Is Born to Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) to, well, Barton Fink. The individual parodies -- the biblical epic, the drawing room drama based on a Broadway hit, the singing-cowboy Western, the Esther Williams extravaganza, the sailors-on-a-spree musical -- are all spot on. But it takes a special audacity -- something the Coens have never lacked -- to send up the anti-communist hysteria that led to the HUAC investigation and the blacklist. The Coens do it by treating the paranoid suspicion that left-wingers were undermining the American Way of Life by injecting Marxism into the movies as if it were real. So we have a communist cell made up of writers who kidnap a movie star for ransom, and another star who defects to the Soviets when the writers row him out to a submarine at night. It's a reductio ad absurdum of Cold War hysteria, as brilliantly handled by the Coens as it was by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove (1964). The Coens also tease us by dropping the names of real people into the script. Josh Brolin plays a studio production chief and fixer named Eddie Mannix, which is the name of a real-life Hollywood fixer who kept wayward stars out of the headlines, and he reports to a studio executive in New York named Nick Schenck, the name of the president of Loew's, Inc., which owned MGM. One of the members of the communist cell in the film, a professor "down from Stanford," is called Herbert Marcuse (John Bluthal), the name of a Marxist philosopher popular with the New Left of the 1960s. It's a film of wonderful cameos, including George Clooney as the kidnapped star, Scarlett Johansson as the Esther Williams equivalent, Ralph Fiennes as the director Laurence Laurentz, and Channing Tatum emulating Gene Kelly as the singing and dancing sailor. Tilda Swinton plays the film's competing gossip columnists, Thora and Thessaly Thacker, based on the notoriously powerful Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. By making them twins, the Coens seem to have conflated them with the competing advice columnists Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers, née Pauline and Esther Friedman.  

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2000)

On the scale for goofy Coen brothers films, O Brother, Where Art Thou? falls somewhere between Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) from goofiest to least goofy. It is, I think, more over-the-top than is absolutely necessary, especially in the idiot hick accents adopted by John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson in their roles. Or maybe they just seem that way because of the differently over-the-top performance of George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill, a man who thinks he talks more intelligently than he does. Still, I like Clooney in this mode, more than I do when he's playing a serious character, and it's to the Coens' credit that they cast him in the role: His performance gives an odd kind of off-balance stability to that of the other two. The chief glory of the movie, however, is its music, chosen by T Bone Burnett, superbly evoking a time and place. As for that time and place, Depression-era Mississippi, the movie pretty much ignores reality in favor of goofing around. It was the era of Bilbo and Vardaman, politicians of deeply cynical evil, and the rival candidates played by Charles Durning and Wayne Duvall don't even approach their horror, even when lampooning it. I laughed when the Ku Klux Klan performed what looked like a marching band half-time routine with a chant that evokes the parading monkey guards in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), but maybe it's the outcome of the recent presidential election that made me feel a little nauseated at even the notion of a comical Klan. A kind of irresponsibility mars the Coens' approach to the material, brilliantly funny as it often is. That said, the pacing of the movie is lively, and it's filled with ever-watchable performers like Durning, Holly Hunter, and John Goodman at their best. And there's always that music: If I'm inclined to forgive the Coens for their irresponsibility, it's because they introduced a lot of people who went out and bought the soundtrack album to some great music.

Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015)

A critical and commercial flop, Tomorrowland is a little too much a film for kids to satisfy sci-fi geeks, and a little too heavy on the sci-fi to hold the attention of kids. It has a few good things going for it: the presence of George Clooney and Hugh Laurie in its cast, and nice performances from two young actors, Britt Robertson as Casey and Raffey Cassidy as Athena. (It's particularly good to see a sci-fi movie for kids with girls as the protagonists.) Unfortunately, the screenplay by director Bird and Damon Lindelof, with contributions to the story from Jeff Jensen, is dauntingly overcomplicated and more than a little preachy. The premise is that somewhere after the 1964 New York World's Fair, with its glittering images of the future, our culture took a turn toward pessimism. We no longer believe that we can progress toward a more equitable society or that we can solve environmental problems with collective application of science and technology, and this pessimism creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Those of us who were old enough in 1964, after the Kennedy assassination and at the beginning of the Vietnam War, may remember the mood a little more darkly than the film posits. But even granted the premise, it seems unlikely that our contemporary malaise is going to be lightened by launching a cyberpunk spaceship designed by Gustave Eiffel, Jules Verne, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison into another dimension. Keegan-Michael Key has an amusing bit as the proprietor of a sci-fi memorabilia shop who says his name is Hugo Gernsback, an in-joke for science fiction fans. (His partner, played by Kathryn Hahn, is named Ursula. As in Le Guin, perhaps?)  The special effects are elaborately routine CGI stuff.

The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)

The Thin Red Line had been much anticipated because it was Malick's first film as director in 20 years, following the much-praised features Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). But it had the misfortune to come out only a few months after Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, whose portrayal of the actuality of combat on D-Day and after was hailed as landmark filmmaking. There are those who think more highly of Malick's film: Spielberg's movie, they argue, is weakened by his desire to celebrate the courage of those who fought in World War II, resulting in the gratuitous frame-story about the aging Ryan's return to the graveyard in Normandy, as well as in some conventional war-movie plotting. Malick's movie is anything but conventional: the well-shot (by John Toll) and -edited (by Leslie Jones, Saar Klein, and Billy Weber) combat scenes are accompanied by a meditative, metaphysics-heavy commentary supposedly voiced by the combatants themselves. To my mind, this mixture of war-movie action and reflective voiceover doesn't work. For one thing, much of what's said in the commentary sounds like the kind of poetry I used to write in college. Malick certainly makes his point about the existential absurdity of war, but he makes it over and over and over, to the expense of developing human characters. Sean Penn, who gets top billing, seems to have been designed to be the movie's central consciousness, but much of that function in the story got lost in the editing: The original cut of the film was five hours long, so it had to be reduced to its current three-hour run time, along with much of the substance of Nick Nolte's blustering colonel, whose motivations are simply alluded to in the voiceover and some of his dialogue. The editing also eliminated the performances of such major film actors as Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Viggo Mortensen, Gary Oldman, and Mickey Rourke, while for some reason retaining the rather pointless cameos by George Clooney and John Travolta. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including best picture, but received none. It may, however, have siphoned away some votes from Saving Private Ryan, allowing Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1989) to emerge as the surprise and still very controversial best picture winner.