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Do yourself a favor and watch Out of Sight this weekend. —Nick Catucci, site director |
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Clooney’s recent film with Noah Baumbach, Jay Kelly, is his most overt interrogation of stardom—what defines it, the impact it has on people who possess it, and how it impacts the people in that star’s orbit. It leverages everything we know about Clooney as a screen presence and an offscreen personality—let’s just say the assonant Uma/Oprah syllable-match of George Clooney/Jay Kelly is not a coincidence—and it builds to a meta-flashback moment seemingly designed to remind us of the depth and breadth of Clooney’s legacy.
Among other things, a project like this gives us a good excuse to rank the best George Clooney movies—but the challenge of making a list like this, particularly as you near its steep apex, is answering the question of which George Clooney we’re talking about. For an actor who’s been accused of playing himself in every film, he’s shown us some fascinating gradations over the years. Clooney the straight leading man of integrity and vision—the general, the captain. Clooney the scumbag—thief, assassin, empty suit, spy, scammer, lothario. Clooney the cocksure buffoon and Clooney the dad and Clooney the stop-motion fox. But in roles that couldn’t be more different, from morose drama to screwball comedy, he always manages—like Eddie Murphy, like Humphrey Bogart, like Robert Redford—to deliver in a consistent register, to sound like himself. There’s a certain music to his language freed from the author of his dialogue.
In terms of methodology for this list, I tried to focus specifically on Clooney’s performances, which is sometimes a crucial distinction. (His four films with the Coen Brothers, for example, appear here in the exact opposite of the order they appeared in on my list of the best Coen Brothers movies a few months back.) Rewatching these films focused solely on the Clooney of it all, I was surprised how much the order of the final 25 defied my expectations.
25. Tomorrowland
A kind of beautiful liberal-utopian vision of the future from a period when Clooney was arguably at his most active in politics, and an infamous bomb based on one of Disney’s lands—but one that actually kind of rocks? Clooney, in reluctant-father-figure mode, is only in half the movie, but he’s locked in. I watched this with my kids; try explaining this Brad Bird-helmed movie’s aesthetic—a 20th-century dream of the future that never came to be, but exists in this pocket universe Clooney and co. are fighting to save—to an elementary-schooler, and you’ll understand exactly why this one didn’t connect with the moviegoing family demo it desperately needed.
24. Syriana
Edutainment of a variety briefly en vogue in the aughts—a “we’re all connected in the global capitalist supply chain” multi-perspective cross-section of a social-studies outcome tree film about the janitors of imperialism directed by the writer of Traffic. As in another role coming later in this list, Clooney put on some weight and grew out his beard to play an old washed spy with no feel for politics, but this has to be one of the most egregious instances of an actor getting his trophy for the wrong role in the long and infamous history of the Oscars committing this particular sin. It’s not that he’s bad in this, by any means. But it’s 2005, a horrifically weak year in Supporting Actor where he criminally beats Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback; as inexplicable an Oscar vote as you’ll find this century, although it’s no fault of Clooney's.
Read the full introduction and list here.
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