In %26#8220;Leatherheads,%26#8221; a romantic comedy he has directed and appears in (opening in April), he is a 1920s professional football player who competes with a younger star player (John Krasinski) for the love of a suspicious journalist (Ren%26#233;e Zellweger). He has entered the Depression %26#8217;30s in the Coen brothers%26#8217; %26#8220;O Brother, Where Art Thou?,%26#8221; the wartime %26#8217;40s in Steven Soderbergh%26#8217;s %26#8220;Good German%26#8221; and the McCarthy %26#8217;50s in %26#8220;Good Night, and Good Luck%26#8221; (which earned him Oscar nominations for directing and writing). His first film as director, the clever %26#8220;Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,%26#8221; spans the %26#8217;60s through the %26#8217;80s as it follows Chuck Barris%26#8217;s tall tale about being a C.I.A. assassin in his spare time from %26#8220;The Gong Show.%26#8221;
And that%26#8217;s not counting projects that simply evoke earlier days. %26#8220;Intolerable Cruelty%26#8221; is an updated screwball comedy, and %26#8220;Ocean%26#8217;s Eleven%26#8221; and its sequels are tributes to Rat Pack Vegas. Even his current legal drama, %26#8220;Michael Clayton,%26#8221; is frequently said to recall %26#8217;70s political thrillers. Does this guy not want to live in the present?
As he sees things, it was not nostalgia but a search for strong, unusual material that led him to the past. %26#8220;I think we all have these ideas: The world was better then, clearer, easier,%26#8221; but making so many period films %26#8220;wasn%26#8217;t in any way a conscious thing,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;I did some contemporary pieces that weren%26#8217;t very good,%26#8221; then started making different choices.
It%26#8217;s true that his affection for the past, as it emerged in a recent telephone conversation, seems less about longing for some glorified bygone era than about being enamored of its films. A thread running through his conversation is that they don%26#8217;t make movies like they used to %26#151; smart, surprising, ambiguous %26#151; and should. That attitude partly explains why he is so often pegged as today%26#8217;s Cary Grant. (%26#8220;Are you tired of hearing that?%26#8221; I asked. %26#8220;Cary Grant must be tired of it,%26#8221; he answered.)
Oddly enough, though, his strongest performances are firmly set in the present, and shaped by political or social urgency. He won his Oscar as best supporting actor for playing a C.I.A. operative undermined by his bosses in %26#8220;Syriana%26#8221; (2005), about the tangle of American foreign policy and oil. And in %26#8220;Michael Clayton%26#8221; he gives what may be his most enduring, sophisticated performance yet, as a lawyer whose scruples have been eroded and whose life is falling apart.
What truly distinguishes him is not his retro-Hollywood stardom or the high-profile activism that has taken him to Darfur and the United Nations, but their unlikely combination, his ability to raise a question with an old-fashioned ring %26#151; %26#8220;What%26#8217;s the right thing to do?%26#8221; %26#151; and apply it to issues that are totally of the moment.
The trick is to manage that without coming off as a sanctimonious publicity hound. Off screen some strategic modesty helps. On screen he avoids preachiness because his films don%26#8217;t pretend to answer tough moral questions; they simply insist the questions are worth asking.
%26#8220;Michael Clayton%26#8221; asks plenty. The film may technically be a legal thriller, with Mr. Clooney as a lawyer whose firm is defending the wrong side in a class-action suit. Essentially, though, it is a moral thriller. His character is a fixer for the firm, a lawyer whose role is to clean up messes quietly, using whatever shady tactics the job requires. When his friend, a partner in the firm (Tom Wilkinson), goes off his medication and manically threatens to reveal damning evidence against their own clients, Clayton faces the ugliness of his own compromised career.
Beyond that bare-bones story, the movie is subtle and character driven. Clayton is a man who should have had the world at his feet. He%26#8217;s smart and ambitious. He looks like George Clooney. Instead his world is crumbling under him: He%26#8217;s a divorced father who will never have enough time with his young son; he is bankrupt, thanks to a bar he bought with his ne%26#8217;er-do-well brother; he has a gambling problem. Mr. Clooney makes you feel in every frame that Clayton himself is sick to death of this tawdry life %26#151; which doesn%26#8217;t mean he%26#8217;ll change it.
If an unattractive actor plays a loser, you don%26#8217;t necessarily stop to wonder why he%26#8217;s a failure. George Clooney as a man struggling to stay afloat makes you ask: How did that happen? Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the film (his first as director, although he is a co-writer of the %26#8220;Bourne%26#8221; movies), used Mr. Clooney%26#8217;s looks shrewdly, to suggest the character%26#8217;s immense, lost possibilities.
%26#8220;All those things are writ large on George: all that charm, all that quickness and easiness,%26#8221; Mr. Gilroy said. %26#8220;It gave a tragic dimension that wouldn%26#8217;t be there with anyone else, with someone like Karl Malden in the role.%26#8221;
%26#8220;Michael Clayton%26#8221; hands Mr. Clooney two big Oscar-bait speeches, and he makes the most of them without going over the edge into scenery chewing. In the more nuanced, he confronts Mr. Wilkinson%26#8217;s character, having tracked him down to protect him. As the scene builds from patient persuasion to fierce exasperation and anger, Mr. Clooney illuminates every turn of Clayton%26#8217;s thoughts. In the more calculated, climactic scene, he confronts Tilda Swinton%26#8217;s character, a lawyer who is beyond devious; while ripping her apart, he is unsparing as he lists his own ethical lapses.
But Mr. Clooney%26#8217;s finest scene is one in which he has no dialogue at all. Having been called away from a poker game to clean up yet another mess %26#151; a hit-and-run in which the firm%26#8217;s client has left the scene %26#151; he gets out of his car on the drive back from the client%26#8217;s house and walks into a field. It is near dawn on a frigid morning, he sees horses in the distance, and as he stares at this landscape of pristine beauty, the entire burden of Michael Clayton%26#8217;s life and conscience becomes visible on Mr. Clooney%26#8217;s face.
The scene plays twice in the film: once near the beginning, just before the story flashes back to events set off four days earlier, and again near the end, when that story comes full circle. The first time you see the pain and sadness; the second time you understand where it comes from. But from the start there is no doubt that this man is weary, soul-sick and troubled about what to do.
Then his car explodes in a fireball behind him; this isn%26#8217;t some philosophical treatise. %26#8220;Michael Clayton%26#8221; is a taut drama, the kind that makes it easy to invoke %26#8217;70s touchstones like %26#8220;The Parallax View.%26#8221; In their published interviews, Mr. Clooney and Mr. Gilroy have talked about their first meeting, in which Mr. Clooney%26#8217;s reluctance to work with a first-time director was overcome, partly because of their shared enthusiasm for those classics. The %26#8217;70s tag has become to %26#8220;Michael Clayton%26#8221; what Cary Grant is to George Clooney: a lazy but plausible label.
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