Heart-throb with a conscience: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2006/03/05 > Heart-throb with a conscience

Heart-throb with a conscience
Sunday, March 05, 2006 - By Niall Stanage
As befits a man who could walk away from tonight’s Oscars ceremony with a statuette in each hand and another in his jacket, George Clooney has been getting acres of press coverage of late. The heart-throb who was catapulted to fame by his role in the hit television series ER has overcome early cinematic disasters such as 1997’s Batman & Robin to become a bona fide star of the big screen. He has also become accomplished at everything from delivering suave chat show anecdotes to outwitting the paparazzi who are almost constantly on his tail.

Despite all that, Clooney must have been a bit startled to see his face gracing the front of last week’s issue of National Review. The pugnacious journal is one of the most influential conservative publications in America.

An unflattering image of a chin-jutting, fist-raised Clooney adorned its cover, accompanied by a headline that blared, ‘‘Get Over Yourself, George’’. The story inside promised to expose ‘‘Hollywood’s Moral Vanity’’.

A decade ago, it would have been impossible to imagine Clooney, then renowned mostly for carousing at glitzy parties and dating some of the world’s most beautiful women, meriting a mention in National Review. But the fact that he now arouses the wrath of the Republican Right says a great deal about his change in status.

Clooney has recently come to be seen as Hollywood’s leading big-name liberal, a more modern version of older left-of-centre icons such as Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand.

Clooney claims to have been interested in politics since childhood. His father was a television newscaster in Kentucky and discussions about current affairs were common around the dinner table. Some form of political engagement in his movies was evident as early as the 1999 film, Three Kings, which took the first Gulf War as its backdrop.

Nevertheless, it is two movies released in the past twelve months that have established the idea of Clooney as a political figure in the public’s mind. Good Night, And Good Luck is about the legendary American broadcaster Edward R Murrow, while Syriana examines the myriad connections between oil, money, politics and corruption.

Clooney is up for an Oscar for each of the movies: he won a nomination as Best Director for Good Night, And Good Luck, while his role as a pudgy, ageing CIA agent in Syriana has been rewarded with inclusion on the shortlist for Best Supporting Actor (he put on 35 pounds for the latter part).

His work on Good Night, And Good Luck also earned him a joint nomination with writing partner Grant Heslov, for Best Original Screenplay. Overall, Good Night, And Good Luck is nominated in six categories, while Syriana is up for two awards.

The disparity in the number of nominations is revealing. Good Night is clearly the stronger of the two movies; its powerful, clear narrative contrasts with Syriana’s ambitious but flawed multilayered approach.

Good Night, And Good Luck takes its title from Murrow’s signing-off catchphrase. Its plot centres on the broadcaster’s public battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the infamous ‘‘red-baiting’’ Irish-American politician from Wisconsin. McCarthy’s anti-Communist ravings were largely without foundation, but they fuelled the paranoid ‘reds under the beds’ mindset that characterised much of American public life in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

McCarthy has always been especially despised in creative circles because his name is forever associated with the blacklisting of artists alleged to have had socialist sympathies. The most famous victims of blacklisting included Charlie Chaplin, actor Paul Robeson and playwright Arthur Miller.

In 1954, Murrow and the team he worked with on the groundbreaking news show See It Now devoted an entire programme to McCarthy. They abandoned the conventional ‘both sides of the story’ approach in favour of a full-frontal attack on McCarthy and his methods, using clips of the senator’s speeches to illustrate contradictions and falsehoods.

Though the show caused a sensation, and is often regarded as a key moment marking the beginning of McCarthy’s downfall, Murrow is said to have had misgivings about the methods he employed.

Good Night, And Good Luck uses original footage of McCarthy, while David Strathairn has deservedly been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Murrow.

Though the show about McCarthy is the dramatic pivot upon which the movie turns, the script also explores the tensions between the crusading impulses of Murrow and the commercial realities of television.

Murrow and his bosses clash as the journalist’s exposes cost the CBS network advertising dollars. The movie shows how Murrow was pressed into doing a largely sycophantic celebrity interview series, Person To Person, as a payoff for the freedom to pursue his more high-minded work.

Syriana, by contrast, is not directly based on real events, though it takes its inspiration from the memoirs of ex-CIA man Robert Baer. Its main focus is a crooked deal involving American energy companies, but it also spends considerable time exploring the bigger contradictions at the core of US policy in the Middle East.

The two movies draw particular potency from their parallels with contemporary events. Good Night, And Good Luck has been widely seen as a broadside against the alleged timorousness of the American media in the Bush era. It begins and ends with words drawn from a speech Murrow delivered in 1958, in which he railed against the vacuousness of much television programming.

In the speech’s most famous, closing passage, Murrow, referring to the power of television, said: ‘‘This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.”

Syriana includes sporadic appearances by characters affiliated with the shadowy Committee for the Liberation of Iran - a none too subtle allusion to the neoconservative lobby, and in particular those within it who were involved with the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), a think tank that made much of the early running in support of the invasion of Iraq.

The concerns that appear to drive both of these movies are shared by many on the American left. Clooney’s public remarks leave no doubt that he sees himself as part of that constituency.

Last month, he told the Guardian of his frustration at being accosted by right-wing Americans who believed he was being unpatriotic in criticising his nation: ‘‘I said: ‘My country right or wrong means women don’t vote, black people sit in the back of buses and we’re still in Vietnam.’”

He went on to blast Democratic Party politicians who said that they were misled into supporting the war in Iraq. ‘‘That’s the kind of thing that drives me crazy,” Clooney said. ‘‘Fuck you, you weren’t misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.”

Those types of pronouncements have copper-fastened Clooney’s liberal reputation. But they are also uncharacteristically shrill. Often, he has been a lot more circumspect. For example, he told the BBC that he did not make Good Night, And Good Luck ‘‘as a protest against any administration . . .my goal isn’t to go out and attack any administration. My goal is just to raise a debate.”

This less confrontational attitude to political issues is not necessarily a bad thing. It distinguishes Clooney from finger-pointing propagandists like Michael Moore.

Clooney has remarked that some Hollywood liberals ‘‘tend to be heavy-handed’’.

He also converted the name of the maker of Fahrenheit 9/11 into a verb, firmly telling one interviewer: ‘‘I don’t Michael Moore this shit. I don’t come out and go: ‘Look at what these fuckers do.’”

But Clooney’s approach is not beyond criticism either. While the general leftward tilt of his politics is clear, what he actually thinks about specific issues often remains murky.

Films aside, what many journalists refer to as his ‘‘activism’’ tends to comprise involvement with worthy but largely uncontroversial causes (like the Bono fronted Drop The Debt campaign) and nebulous statements about peace or holding the powerful to account.

Asked shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001 what he wanted for Christmas, Clooney replied: ‘‘I want one day when nobody is getting shot at. Call a truce for a day.”

This kind of do-gooder vagueness reveals the most grandiose claims made on Clooney’s behalf to be ridiculous. Some people have suggested, only half in jest, that he should run for president. Clooney, to his credit, has ruled out running for any public office at all.

The actor’s critics say the glibness that sometimes infects his movies and his public statements goes hand in hand with hollowness. He is guilty, they insist, of the kind of moral posturing that does not involve genuine courage.

Conservative writer Joy Nordlinger excoriated Clooney for the ‘‘nobody getting shot at’’ remark, contending that it was ‘‘a child’s response. . . People are just shooting at each other, you know, and shooting at each other is bad.”

In the recent National Review cover story, Mark Steyn accused Clooney of epitomising a certain strain of Hollywood disingenuousness: ‘‘Hollywood prefers to make ‘controversial’ films about controversies that are long settled, rousing itself to fight battles long won.

‘‘Hollywood’s ‘bravery’ is an almost pathological retreat: it’s against segregated drinking fountains in Alabama and blacklisting writers on 1950s variety shows.”

Steyn concluded by looking forward to the Oscars and bitterly predicting that, ‘‘while Danish cartoonists are in hiding for their lives, George Clooney will be televised around the world picking up an award for his bravery.”

Clooney may well pick up awards tonight. If that happens, some people may agree with Steyn, seeing the exercise as just the latest bout of Hollywood self-congratulation.

But it is a fair bet that just as many people, if not more, will see an Oscar for Clooney as deserved acclamation of an actor willing to raise important subjects.

Some people may sneer. For others, the heart-throb has become a hero.