‘Just someone who’s lost’: From Out of Sight to Up in the Air

(Caution: contains spoilers. I.e. it’s probably not a good idea to read this if you haven’t seen either of the two films referenced in the title. Or Solaris. Or Rocky III.)

I have been trying to imagine George Clooney in a boxing movie. Something like Rocky or Cinderella Man. Or Raging Bull. To imagine him breaking his hands upon a jail cell wall.

I have been trying to fit him into those bar basement scenes in Fight Club. To see him with his face bruised and bloodied against the concrete in the same way that Edward Norton’s gets. In the same way that Brad Pitt’s gets.

I can’t.

Perhaps it’s because my imagination doesn’t really have much to work with. After all (and please correct me if I’m wrong), Clooney just doesn’t seem to get too physically messed up in films. Stallone, Crowe, De Niro, Norton, they all get messed up plenty. In their harder films, they all seem to affect a stance that demonstrates allegiance to the maxim Stallone himself professes as Rocky Balboa in the 6^th and final film in that series: ‘It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’ With Clooney, it has always seemed as though it’s more about avoiding being hit (observe, for instance, the scene in Ocean’s Eleven where he and a tough-guy acquaintance fake his beating/interrogation). This is not to suggest that he plays cowardly types, more that he generally plays characters who rely on their cunning, on their charm. His casting as Mr. Fox in the recent Roald Dahl adaptation fits this persona perfectly.

That the role finds him as a voice actor is also oddly fitting. The more I consider that fact, the notion of Clooney as voice, the more it becomes apparent why I’m struggling to put him into the great big black and white boxing ring inside my head. He is a talker, not a fighter. Even when he takes roles in action movies, it always seems like other people take larger parts in the action than him. Consider Three Kings, and the Mexican standoff that develops in the small Iraqi town which Clooney’s Archie Gates and fellow soldiers believe to hold a bunker full of gold bullion (‘No, not the little cubes you put in soup’). Instead of attempting to instigate a gunfight, he tries to explain to his men exactly what happens to the body as a result of gunshot wounds. He is a negotiator. He is the referee, the man in the middle, not one of the men in the corner. He is always looking to make sure that it’s a good, clean fight.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident in one of his characters than it is in Up in the Air’s Ryan Bingham. Even though his job is essentially to inform others that they have lost theirs, he has honed the craft of doing this with minimum damage to a very fine art. We are both shown this and told about it every time he talks about his work. He knows people don’t like what he does, but he feels it is necessary, and so justifies his position by demonstrating just how good he is at it. Talking, that is. Because, of course, the other facet of Bingham’s (professional) life is that he is a motivational speaker. One of those people who goes around trying to convince other people to improve themselves and their lifestyles. One of those people who goes around trying to help people keep on moving forward without getting hit. Again, he has this down to a fine art. He rolls out the same speech at each conference event he gets invited to, and gets the same response from his audience – muted hope tinged with subdued despair. The longer the film continues, the more the audience realises that this is pretty much how he feels too. He gets back from these speaking engagements exactly what he puts in. They are not made to seem like the important part of the endeavour. They are not, in themselves, the ultimate goal.

It is the same with actual heist in Ocean’s Eleven. It is not the taking of the money that really matters, or that’s even really the difficult part – it’s the getting away with it that counts. The heist may be the showy part, the aesthetic triumph, for all parties concerned: director, actors, characters, story, but it means almost nothing without the big payoff.

And yet, at the heart of a lot of Clooney’s films is the implicit acceptance that such a payoff will be short-lived. In Ocean’s Eleven there are only about 10 minutes of film after the completion of the heist, compared to about 100 minutes before. The way the shot of the fountain jutters and fades just before the final scene suggests an odd kind of emptiness, an impermanence to everything that’s gone before and which is coming after. It says, simply, that all good things come to an end.

Perhaps this is why I still can’t place him in a boxing ring. I get the sense that he, or, rather, the characters he plays, simply don’t see the point in fighting just to win, because they have already thought about it too much and they know that victory won’t last so it doesn’t seem worth working for. It is not necessarily a defeatist attitude, but it is a defensive one, a self-protecting one. And his characters generally stick to it, unless, of course, there is another incentive, another source of happiness to get him through even if the other things he’s working for go sour.

Usually, these other incentives are women.

In Ocean’s Eleven, Clooney’s Danny Ocean is ostensibly going after the money, but really just wants his ex-wife back. Similarly, in Up in the Air, as soon as he begins to feel the inevitability of his career completely changing shape, he invests more effort and time in trying to make things work with Alex, a female fellow traveller he has met with occasionally on the road. He even invites her to accompany him to a family wedding. Throughout both films he is absolutely on top of his game when it comes to charm. This is due in no small part to the excellent scripts with which he’s provided, especially in the latter, but it is also very much due to his undeniable natural talent for negotiation. He gives the impression that what he’s saying is exactly what he’d say even if it hadn’t been scripted. He sells it completely. He understands that the audience has to believe him in order for us to believe that the woman in question would believe him, or at least be willing to go along with him even if they didn’t. For instance, the dialogue in the scene where Ryan Bingham first meets Alex sounds so spot-on that it’s entirely plausible that their evening should end up the way it does.

In the wider body of Clooney’s work, however, it’s also entirely plausible that their relationship should end up how it does as well.

In Out of Sight he plays a bank robber, Jack Foley, pursued by Jennifer Lopez’s Karen Sisco, a US Marshall following his escape from the Glades Correctional Facility. Their first meeting occurs immediately upon the event of this escape, when he bundles her into the boot of her car and jumps in beside her, whilst his partner Buddy drives them away. About 3 minutes after this is the moment when it becomes apparent that they are attracted to each other, or rather, that she is attracted to him. He is attracted to her from the get-go. They are talking, and he quotes a film, Network, with such childlike glee that she can’t help but smile. He has his hand on her hip and she doesn’t move it off. This is not because she is scared to do so. After all, unbeknownst to him, she keeps a gun in the boot. When the car stops, she has a chance to shoot him and Buddy, but she doesn’t. Not then.

But later, near the end, she shoots him. In the leg, but she still shoots him. She has to take him back to the correctional facility. Both of them knew it was coming. Especially Foley.

Something did happen in between that first meeting and that (almost) last, however. Something key to explaining how Clooney’s characters get by, even if they think the odds are ultimately against them. Foley tracks down Sisco to her hotel in Detroit, and approaches her as she sits alone at a table near the bar. Earlier, in the car boot, he’d mused about how things might be different between them if they were two different people, if they were strangers who had no idea about what the other did for a living, and so it is that he proceeds to act this theory out. He gives his name as Gary. She gives hers as Celeste. He asks what she does for a living, starts the small-talk, gives compliments as though this is the first time he’s seen her and thought those things. Then she asks him what he does, and he immediately punctures the fantasy, explaining that ‘I don’t think it works if we’re somebody else.’ And he’s right, because this has to be their escape, their personal getaway, not Gary’s, not Celeste’s. All they have to do is put their ‘professional’ lives aside, and focus on that sense of the personal. Nothing exists outside of them and the rooms in which they find themselves. It is a mutual arrangement, and it suits them fine, until morning.

At that point, their professional lifestyle choices bleed back in, and they both debate whether they actually did what they did because of the thrill of breaking the rules dictated by their position, or because of some genuine feeling. It is Foley who concludes the discussion in favour of the latter point, because it is perhaps him who needs to believe that the most. It is absolutely crucial to his survival that he was not just a bank robber when he was with her, but that he was himself.

It is the same in Up in the Air, and the way Ryan interacts with Alex. He needs their time together more and more to be something that exists outside of his professional life, and his career choice, because, quite simply, that professional life seems to be coming apart. He embraces a fantasy that states that the two states of being can exist outside of each other’s sphere of influence. As such, he decides to go to his sister’s wedding, and to take Alex there with him, not because it is a more personal thing to him, at first, but because it feels like it should be, and because there is no group that has been more isolated from him by his work practices and his constant travelling than his family. Everything goes surprisingly well. He feels good, even though he’s soon going to relinquish a big part of the lifestyle he has come to love, and to depend on. He doesn’t mind that one good thing is ending, because another is beginning.

And this is, in view of the philosophy by which his characters often seem to live, that which suggests that the best anyone can hope for are small victories here and there to lessen the pain, where his character makes a mistake that ends up costing him dearly. If it was a boxing movie, this would be the ringing of the bell to signal the start of the last round before he gets KO’d. He has started to believe that not only is winning possible, but that he is bound to do it.

Or perhaps he has just given in to the fantasy, given up on anything else. After all, when the moment finally comes that he achieves his target amount of air-miles, it feels, to both him and the audience, like an anti-climax. Even if it does involve Sam Elliot, longtime owner of cinema’s greatest moustache. He has, to quote an old proverb, put all his eggs in one basket, and he will have nothing left if that basket gets dropped. He is starting to depend upon the fantasy as much as it depends on him to keep it going.

There is one clear parallel with this in Clooney’s career, though it is one which takes the notion of such a fantasy even further by involving it in science fiction. This is Solaris. Again directed by Soderbergh, this is a remarkable departure in terms of tone, composition and conversation from both Ocean’s Eleven and Out of Sight, and yet the essential outsider/underdog aspect of Clooney’s character remains. The plot, on a basic level, concerns Clooney, as a psychologist, Chris Kelvin, being taken to a research station orbiting the titular planet, following a distress call from an old friend. Upon arriving there, he discovers that this friend is dead and the other crew members are living in fear of physical manifestations of people from their memories – unwanted avatars of their repressed subconscious, as it were. These, apparently, are being caused by the planet, the magnetic fields of which are steadily expanding. The apparition (I term it this, though it seems far more bodily than the average cinematic ghost) which appears to Kelvin takes the form of a woman we first discover he fell in love with, then later find out he married. Before flashbacks confirm this, we infer, from his shock upon realising her being there is not just a dream, that it is no longer possible (or shouldn’t be) for her to be anywhere outside of his head. She is dead.

However, as is often the case with such things, she is recurring now, in this faraway place, because of some unfinished business, because of some lingering problem within Kelvin’s mind that goes beyond the simple, harsh fact of his losing her. It was the manner in which this loss took place that disturbs him, that will not allow her to quit his conscious mind. It is here, in this film perhaps most of all, that we see Clooney’s charm and conversational talent failing, that we see the wires in his head beginning to short from being stripped back just a little too much. And it is very much his failure to talk his wife into submission during an argument that leads to the tragedy by which all else in his life comes to be measured – she has been distant for a while before this argument, and yet he has not taken the time to find out why, he has not listened, he has not asked, and, when this explodes into an argument, he leaves without hearing the last words that she says. He cannot know, at that moment, that she is going to kill herself. But he should.

And so, more than the other remaining crew members, he, after the initial panic has died down, is eager to understand this new manifestation of her. He is intent on knowing more about her than he does. He wants to make amends, to salvage something before she throws in the towel once again. And yet he cannot. Not really.

Such a pattern occurs in numerous other Clooney films as well. In fact, it is surprising, given his stature and reputation, just how seldom his characters actually end up with the girl when the final credits roll. Unlike in Solaris, this is usually because of circumstances slightly beyond his control – in Out of Sight, Karen Sisco is on the other side of the law, and so there isn’t much hope and both know it; in Up in the Air, Alex turns out to have a husband and kids. However, just like in Solaris, in both of those films things go downhill and end how they do because he starts wanting to know more, to break himself and the women out of the limited roles of which it seems to have been pre-dictated that their relationships should comprise. In the former, that effort does lead to Jack Foley and Karen Sisco spending the night together, but it also leads to Jack doing what he knows, having come that far, he must – returning to the gun he stole from her, which she later shoots him with, and accepting that, whether they want them to or not, their professions define them much more than their personal desires do. In the latter, this involves Ryan Bingham using some of his air-miles to go to Alex’s home, with the intention of surprising her with some romantic notion, of bringing her into the life of ‘freedom’ he has created and subsisted on for so long, and yet it is there, at her front door, that he is himself surprised by a rather definitive denial, and turned away.

In both cases, the problem is caused by the difference between what his character wants to believe and what it actually the case, especially regarding Alex. He wants, perhaps needs, to think that she is a female version of him, his direct and perfectly-tailored counterpart, possibly even the elusive ‘soul mate’ – indeed, she fuels this fantasy by telling him at one point that ‘I’m just like you, but with a vagina’. Of course, she isn’t, and he knows this, in retrospect, piecing events and conversations together in his head. We can tell this, even though it is only implicit in the film. We can tell this because we know how this plays out, from retrospective analyses of our own.

And this is where Solaris comes in, dancing nimbly and unsettlingly on that line between fantasy and memory. Kelvin wants this (re)incarnation of the woman he loved to be more open and readable to him, to be more fully understandable in both her words and her actions. This is why, after the first time such an apparition enters his room, he is reluctant to destroy it or banish it into space. But, because she is a composite from his memories and his memories alone, she winds up acting and being exactly as distant as before – he still cannot know her. He still cannot know anyone beyond what he thinks he knows about them. Furthermore, he is less and less sure that he knows himself. Standard existential crisis fare then. If only it were standard.

By the end, as the planet grows to the point where it threatens the ship, complicated scientific and/or psychological explanations are unnecessary. What it comes down to is a simple choice between survival in a reality where he is forever aware that he did not really know his wife, where he forever feels guilt for not being able to help her, and submersion into the world that produced this (limited) remodelling of her. It seems, upon closing, that he has taken the latter, that he will exist there in a kind of shallow, undemanding happiness, but it is not certain. It is perhaps the closest equivalent in Clooney’s oeuvre to the Rocky III freeze-frame ending.

If this were a boxing movie, one might ask, would you put money on him to win?

Or has he, in giving up his torment, already lost sight of a vital piece of his humanity, of the ragged essence that clings on, inevitably, at the centre of a person’s being?

Maybe Solaris, then, is the main reason I cannot place him in a boxing movie. Because it, arguably, ends in him quitting, throwing in the towel, and no good boxer, no really good boxer, ever quits in the movies. They can lose, and lose badly, but they shouldn’t quit.

But maybe Solaris’ anomalous nature within his filmography means that I’ve got things slightly wrong. Maybe Solaris is the exception that proves the rule. The rule being, in this instance, that just because Clooney doesn’t box doesn’t mean that he doesn’t fight. Maybe it just usually means that he doesn’t fight too well.

Because the fact is that, onscreen, George Clooney is a loser. In fact, he may just be the ultimate loser for our time, for now. History and society simply appears to have made him too aware of the inevitability of failure, of the bastards grinding him down, of being beaten and left out cold on the canvas. It is there in way he throws his tie down after being refused a better job than security guard at an old-acquaintance’s firm in Out of Sight. It is there in the way he talks to Julia Roberts the first time we see them together in Ocean’s Eleven. It is even there when he tries to give advice to his onscreen daughter in One Fine Day about how to behave towards men when she’s older. And yet, with every new film, he still gets back in the ring, trying to find the perfect way to dodge all the punches, even if he knows deep down that that perfect way does not exist. He still ends up taking the hits, one way or another, but the main thing is that he keeps moving forward. Because, well, as his Ryan Bingham says, ‘moving is living’. Make no mistake.