Clooney and the new Left Political Star

NYT Film Critic of-note A. O. Scott has a very interesting piece placing George Clooney in the current position of a natural lineage of wise leftist political actors who have transformed their glittery stardom into auteur empires of ideas following nearly directly from Warren Beatty and Robert Redford's career moves through the 1970's.

This premise is interesting and noteworthy for various reasons, and by no means exclusive or unique- Mel Gibson, for instance, constantly espouses his political and religious concepts through his arts. In a much more moronically trifling example, Bruce Willis has offered up some of his personal fortune as a bounty on Osama or other Al Qaeda leaders- the active parallel to the Sean Penn's boat sinking in New Orleans. These are dissatisfying because they are so clearly self-serving, too-direct, brutalist. No one man can change the world by force, as each of these examples attempts to do.

But Clooney's capacity is not one of brutalism- he espouses charm, wit, and fun while engaging seriousness, ambiguity, and reason- all this seemingly in his movie-star personality, mind you, and reflected in his work.

But this fall, Clooney is in two movies that are likely to dominate discussions of the political relevance - and also the political limitations - of American cinema. "Good Night, and Good Luck," which he directed and helped to write (and in which he almost incidentally appears), reconstructs the on- and off-air battles between Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy. "Syriana," written and directed by Stephen Gaghan and produced by (among others) Clooney and Soderbergh, takes place very much in the present. Loosely based on the memoirs of Robert Baer, a C.I.A. officer, its four entwined plots deal with Islamic terrorism, American foreign policy and the machinations of big oil companies - all of which swirl together in a nexus of double-dealing and moral ambiguity.

Much has been made of the topicality of "Good Night, and Good Luck," not least by Clooney himself, who screened it for high-profile journalists and media figures in the weeks before it opened last month. Like a number of other recent films - Bill Condon's "Kinsey" was last year's prime example - it uses a story from the past as a way of approaching, by implication and indirection, issues that bedevil the present. The period details serve as a kind of insulation, like oven mitts protecting against material that may otherwise be too hot to handle. The parallels are inevitably inexact but provocative all the same. In a recent interview on the public radio program "Fresh Air," Clooney called the film's events "prescient" for raising "the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to always question authority, whoever that authority is" and added, "I thought it was a good time to talk again about the debate of using fear to erode civil liberties." The picture sounds a warning - or rather repeats one, by beginning and ending with a speech Murrow made in 1958 about the dangers facing broadcast journalism - but it also tells a nostalgia-tinged story of triumph. In some quarters, it has been derided (and in others welcomed) as a "message movie," burying complexities of history and character in a parable of good and evil.

But the film's mood is more striking than its lessons; more than the subject matter, it is the atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia that places "Good Night, and Good Luck" in the tradition of American political filmmaking. The narrative may move toward an outcome that seems preordained - the exposure of McCarthy as a bully and a demagogue - but the camera tells another story, of murk and shadows and shades of gray.

"Syriana," with its sun-bleached desert colors, works almost in reverse, setting up expectations of clarity and systematically undermining them, suggesting that the world consists entirely of gray areas, interlocking conspiracies and ulterior motives. Invoking the conventions of the political thriller even as it departs from them, the film depicts a world in which paranoia is common sense and conspiracies are hatched in daylight.

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The two "Ocean" films, both directed by Soderbergh, are Clooney's biggest hits to date, and while they don't challenge him much as an actor, they do allow him to indulge the playful nonchalance that is a large part of his appeal and paradoxically gives him license to be serious. Much as he makes headlines for feuding with Bill O'Reilly and pronouncing on the state of journalism, he has also been known to flaunt the prerogatives of celebrity and bachelorhood and to play elaborate practical jokes on friends and associates. His ability to be both devilish and earnest is perhaps best captured in his definitive performance so far, as Major Archie Gates in David O. Russell's "Three Kings."

That movie, released in the fall of 1999, looks back at the first gulf war and forward as well. A bit of a disappointment at the box office, it has had a vibrant afterlife, especially as the geopolitical situation has given it the air of prophecy. The movie is a fast-moving, funny and appallingly violent meditation on, among other things, the contradictory nature of American power. It betrays some of the liberal ambivalence of the Clinton era - an eagerness to believe that America could be the exemplar and enforcer of democratic and humane ideals checked by a habitual suspicion of ulterior motives. Gates, who sets out with a ragged band of misfit soldiers to steal Kuwaiti bullion he hears is stashed in a bunker, embodies both arrogance and decency. The arc of his character takes him from self-serving nihilism to heroic fellow-feeling, a progression that enables the movie's uplifting, somewhat implausible ending. Archie Gates is an updating of the Humphrey Bogart wartime hero: a cynic called to a higher purpose who turns his low cunning into virtue. Gates also recalls the insider-outsider, alienated heroes of the 70's, a man at odds with the institution in which he finds himself embedded but who turns out, half-unwittingly, to be the truest defender of its principles.

Clooney's engagement in political narrative is interesting enough because of our current era of non-engagement. Venues such as the No Spin Zone on The Factor constantly deride both celebrity involvment and intellectual involvement in the political arena while the conservative movement behind them seeks to simply replace leftist political celebrities with rightist ones, and to replace intellectualism itself with right-wing think-tank ordained ideology. Celebrity is mocked and derided, and constantly dumped to the wayside by the media as an irrelevancy in matters of social policy. And yet, as A. O. Scott says earlier in his piece:

Not that the transaction runs smoothly. Like everyone else, actors have ideas and opinions not directly related to their work, which they are sometimes inclined to express publicly. As soon as they do, however, they are accused of exploiting (and therefore of risking) their presumptive right to public attention. As tempting as it is for actors to use their stardom as a platform, to speak out on causes and issues or to involve themselves in crusades or campaigns, the temptation to ridicule them when they do so is perhaps even greater. We are accustomed to suspecting that their sincerity is an act and to assuming that their displays of concern are at bottom expressions of narcissism. Who do they think they are? Why should we care what these people - whose faces lure us into buying magazines, whose clothes and hairstyles we imitate, whose private lives we take to be our business - have to say about AIDS in Africa or the war in Iraq? How dare they presume to tell us how we should vote?

It is as though the currency we've culturally exchanged with celebrity is one of gossip, feel-good page coverage, and relationship or drug-inspired tragedy; and yet when personalities arise that are willing to espouse their perspectives in a way that inspires thought, they are put at risk.

But Clooney is, it is true, engaging in the culture with great similarities to Redford and others that came before him. While he wants you to consider his perspective, he creates art that grapples with that perspective. Good Night, and Good Luck is subtle and haunting, but it is as much about the limitations and potential of the medium of television as being a smart, willingly-intellectual and informed medium of debate and reason. It is not about heroism, but rather the hero stands firm in saying that his position offers the absolute most positive version of television- one that serves and informs the public, rather than the Bill O'Reilley school of disinformation and self-serving controversy.

Clooney chose not to campaign for his father's congressional bid in Kentucky in 2004 and actively comments that it's time that Hollywood took its fingers off of political intervention, because it does more harm than good for their candidates. Prescient knowledge, in many ways- he understands the culture's exchange with Hollywood has constructed and false limits, but limits nonetheless. And yet, he refuses to disengage from the battle for cultural ideas and wisdom. Clooney is rediscovering the potential and the limitations of the medium of stardom in a refreshing way. Good for him.