George Clooney, master of the enigmatic smile

George Clooney is currently on our screens in Up In The Air a film in which he plays a man whose job it is to fire people and whose sole interest is to collect more air miles – not your typical dashing hero then. Looking back at Clooney’s career it’s clear that Clooney excels in playing roles that are sympathetically challenging. True to what people say he is the modern Cary Grant, able to use his natural charisma to play the romantic lead, but also capable of making a fool out of himself and playing characters with a murky sense of morality.

Clooney has come a long way from his beginnings, as a man who “never wanted to be an actor” (one of his first jobs was cutting tobacco in Kentucky) and was roped into being an extra for his cousin’s horse-racing film And They’re Off (1978). And who could forget his early efforts as Matt in horror-comedy B-movie Return of The Killer Tomatoes! (1988) or as a lip-synching transvestite extra in The Harvest (1993). It was, however, his role as Dr. Doug Ross in the brilliant ER which catapulted him to fame and the hearts of a legion of adoring fans, showcasing his star quality and so making Hollywood take notice.

From there he went onto star as bank robber Seth Gecko in the inventive if a little overrated Tarantino-penned From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and uh, Batman and Robin (1997) ok so maybe it’s best we forget about that one (which even Clooney himself admits was a “the worst movie he ever made”.) But it wasn’t until Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight (1998) that Clooney really got to explore both his dark and light sides as another bank robber, charming and witty career criminal Jack Foley – a man who despite being smart and cultured just cannot escape his addiction to crime. In the same year he also got a bit part as a wishful commanding officer in Terence Malick’s masterly The Thin Red Line, where he was apparently cast just to appease the studio.

The next significant role which really proved his acting credentials-and also marked the start of his career in films which criticize the U.S Government’s handling of foreign affairs (as well as the brutality if war seen already in The Thin Red Line) – was David O. Russell’s satirical, surreal and cerebral Three Kings (1999). He played Major Archie Gates a man who is at first motivated by greed to steal a stash of Saddam Hussein’s bullion but then, against U.S. policy, gets caught up with the victims of the war, Iraqi citizens and local rebels. His portrayal of a man battling with his conscience and questioning his role in the war is both moving and real and shows how much he has matured as an actor.

From one maverick director to another, Clooney quickly showed his knack for picking interesting roles in idiosyncratic

George has something on his face in "O Brother"

auteur-driven films with his next role as Everett McGill in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou (2000), a film he did for nothing just to see it get made. Here he really showed his aptitude for the rigours of screwball comedy, handling the fast-paced dialogue, physical comedy, goofy mannerisms and comic timing with great aplomb. His Golden Globe-winning performance reminding you of just why he is called the modern Cary Grant, while also referencing his hero Clark Gable. At the same time he makes the role his own.

He then proceeded to have a box-office smash with Soderbergh’s slick heist film Ocean’s Eleven (2001) produced by his and Soderbergh’s production company Section Eight. The film started a franchise that would allow him to take more risks on increasingly challenging films. One of these risks was his brilliant directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002) – a film that in its style paid homage to some of Clooney’s favourite directors like Alan J. Pakula or John Frankenheimer. It also showed his talent in handling the mix of different genres, the film comprising elements of black comedy, cold war spy thriller and bio-pic. He also took a risk in his choice of Sam Rockwell for lead role, who usurped the studio-friendly Johnny Depp, a risk which ultimately paid off and effectively launched the talented Rockwell’s career. While Clooney himself in another move away from romantic lead, played an enigmatic and unsympathetic CIA agent.

Clooney went on to work again with the Coen brothers with the sadly underrated Intolerable Cruelty (2003) playing a ruthless divorce lawyer, Miles Massey (a precursor possibly of the character he plays in Up In The Air), who gets taken at his own game by the equally ruthless gold-digger Marylin Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones).Yet again Clooney shows himself adept at looking foolish and morally dubious while still remaining a charismatic screen presence.

2005 saw the double critically approved whammy of Clooney’s second directorial effort Good Night And Good Luck co-written with Grant Heslov, and Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana which he executive produced, a film for which he won both the Golden Globe and an Oscar. These intelligent films show Clooney in truth and justice-seeking mode. In the former exposing the egotistical bullying tactics that American politicians use (in this case Senator Joe McCarthy), and in the latter showing the tangled complexities of US-Middle-East relations when seen in conjunction with the merciless battle for oil. Brave choices for a man known as  a “Hollywood heart-throb.” Syriana also proved once and for all that Clooney was willing to sacrifice his screen appeal for a role, putting on the pounds and growing a beard to play the role of puffy-faced double-crossed CIA agent Bob Barnes.

From here came more complex films set in dark amoral landscapes, notably Soderbergh’s nu-film-noir The Good German (2006) and Tony Gilroy’s slow-burning corporate thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Yet again Clooney showed that making films largely just for the money was nothing he could be accused of, tackling challenging cerebral material which was far from mainstream values.

Of late some of  his films have been of the hit-and-miss if well-intentioned variety (the less said of Burn After Reading (2008) the better). But you can still see Clooney challenging himself or as he put it in a recent interview “trying to do stuff that’s pushing the envelope.” And his upcoming film The American in which he plays a disillusioned assassin in hiding certainly looks set to be promising, directed as it is by Control’s Anton Corbijn. One thing’s for sure Clooney is always worth watching.

Priscilla Eyles