Dream a Little Dream of Them

I think often about this one scene from “Ocean’s Twelve.” It happens near the end, when The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel) returns to his luxurious Lake Como villa to find his thieving rival Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and wife Tess (Julia Roberts) sipping his champagne on the balcony. It’s not so much what they talk about, no matter how crucial it may be, as it is the chemistry between Roberts and Clooney. To paraphrase former Notre Dame Football coach Lou Holtz explaining the campus’s mystique, Roberts and Clooney’s chemistry requires no explanation if you’ve seen it just as no explanation, really, would suffice if you haven’t. Their chemistry just is; it’s undeniable; it’s off the charts. They work charmingly, effortlessly, innately in one another’s company. Together, they reduce Cassel’s character to a bystander on the balcony of his own home, merrily communicating in what’s tantamount to secret code. (Roberts whispering into Clooney’s ear...shut it down. Just shut down the cinema and go home.) Every time I see it, every time I think about it, I think: God, what a waste, what an absolute waste that the movie industry has collectively, idiotically failed to harness this again in any real way since it happened nearly 20 years ago. That’s as big an indictment on modern movies as any.

I thought of this scene again just the other week when the 2014 Vanity Fair video of Julia Roberts and George Clooney having a side-by-side discussion for the magazine’s Hollywood issue of that year was uploaded to Twitter apparently apropos of no other reason than reveling in it all over again. Though the Vanity Fair interviewer asks them questions, their magnetism is such that they could be talking about anything, their star power virtually illuminated by the blank white wall behind them, putting the focus right where it needs to be. And though George mentions having a movie theater in his home, and though Julia cites the expensive Tiffany ring gifted to her by the “Ocean’s Eleven” team, they still come across not like you and me but relatable nevertheless because of the jovial way they b.s. one another. And that is to say nothing of Julia’s exalted laugh, which she deploys twice, the guffaw that elevates her into the firmament being the same thing that renders her down to earth. It’s always good hear to that laugh. 

I know, I know. Loyal frustrated followers are turning up their noses. “Is he on about this again,” you’re asking. He’s whining about a lack of Roberts/Clooney comedies every fifth post. But that’s the thing, I always wonder if I’m merely screaming into the void, consumed by an issue about which The People (as in, What The People Want) could not care less. And while reading the Twitter Tea Leaves is not the same thing as doing genuine market research, scrolling through the effusive replies and the quote tweets to this tweet of the Roberts and Clooney heartened me. I can’t say for certain that all these people were younger than me, but a good chunk seemed as though they were, and they were just as smitten with the self-evident chemistry. They saw it! They all saw it!

As much hope and joy as I felt scrolling through these replies, however, I also came away saddened by the fatalism in so many responses, those referring to Roberts and Clooney as the last two movie stars or the kind of white people, to borrow one phrase exactly, they just don’t make anymore. Maybe they don’t make ’em like Julia and George, fair, but the real reason we don’t see movie stars anymore is for the same reason that we too often discuss them in terms of box office receipts for some other sort of analytical b.s. unattuned to seeing movies as flickering myths. Movie Stars are about a feeling, the kind you get watching Julia and George in one another’s company, and it’s out there in other places too, I swear it is, in the space of Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan in the “Creed” movies or Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in “La La Land”. Even Julia Fox in “Uncut Gems” “has got something”, as they said in “A Star Is Born.” Problem is, rather than specifically cultivating projects around stars, we have gone the other way. The concept, the almighty, dreaded I.P comes first. And though I know one viral Tweet won’t change anything, it was still comforting to see, if just for a moment, to see the allure of Roberts and Clooney justify its own existence, to see those stars shining so bright. 

Watching Notting Hill on a Plane

For the holidays, my father-in-law received “The Movie Musical!”, the new book by Jeanine Basinger. Naturally I mentioned that Basinger had authored one of my favorite movie books, twelve years ago, “The Star Machine”, an equally pragmatic and philosophical account of and reckoning with the Movie Star, which naturally caused My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife to inhale deeply because I’m always – always – prattling on about that book. I can’t help it! Nothing vexes me more than the ongoing tragic plight of the Movie Star. Not even Disney! I’d cut Disney a little slack if I had confidence they could churn out Movie Stars like the old Star Machine. But Disney ain’t a Star Machine; they’re a Content Machine and the people in their Content are a dime a dozen. [Cries.] Anyway.

The previous afternoon, on Christmas Eve, flying out east to spend the holidays with my in-laws, I noticed the gentleman sitting a row in front of me, catty-corner, had tuned the screen on his American Airlines seatback to the twenty-year old rom com classic “Notting Hill.” The critic K. Austin Collins has written of the immense value in watching other people’s airplane movies. This is partially, as Collins notes, about an airplane being a shared space where, rather than everyone’s attention being strictly focused on a single movie, like in a regular theater, a person’s individual taste is broadcast to everyone around her/him. That’s why on a transatlantic flight this past May I watched “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” and “Casablanca”, to let these whippersnappers know just how I rolled, dammit. But Collins also notes how watching a movie on an airplane over someone’s shoulder is a window into filmmaking 101: with dialogue gone, you’re left to make sense of things from acting and cutting and framing, that’s it.

Retroactive 1999 Scarlett O’Hara Curtain Dress Random Award goes to...

I had seen “Notting Hill” and had seen televised bits and pieces of it over the years, meaning I knew what was going on. But as I watched it in silence over a stranger’s shoulder, ignoring the book in my lap, scenes like the dinner party where all of Grant’s friends react to the presence of Roberts’s movie star character Anna Scott would let you know, in and of themselves, that her character is someone important. And the way Roberts plays these moments, with a coy yet intrigued smile, compared to other moments, when she suddenly swoops in to encounter the jackanapeses saying things about her or fields questions at a press junket, demonstrate how she flips a switch, moving from, respectively, elegant confrontation and quiet comedy to cool command. Truly, Jules owned that screen even on mute.

And as I watched with nothing but the noise of an American Airlines Airbus for a soundtrack, the meta qualities of “Notting Hill’s” narrative fell away and I just saw her, Julia, the movie star. I felt like Hugh Grant in the scene where his character just sits back (sits forward, actually) and watches Julia’s character in a movie within the movie. The scene took me back to my friend’s holiday party a few weeks earlier, where another friend, over our seventh or eleventh cup of festive punch, elucidated his belief that movies were about, more than anything, the human face. I nodded along. That’s a belief my main man David Thomson has elucidated too, writing “In an age of special effects, the most special effect of all is the human face.” As it turned out, of all the movies I saw on the big screen in 2019, none looked any bigger than Julia Roberts in “Notting Hill” on a screen the size of an iPad on an airplane seatback.

Ben Is Back

“Ben Is Back” opens inside a church sanctuary during rehearsal for the Christmas Eve pageant as the camera pans down from above and past a stained glass window, coming to rest on Holly Burns (Julia Roberts), wide-eyed and wide-smiled, sitting in a pew, a classic kind of movie star shot. Immediately, however, “Ben Is Back” cuts from the church’s interior warmth to an exterior cold, drab grey where the eponymous Ben (Lucas Hedges), Holly’s son, vaping, his face nearly doused with a hood, stands outside a house, peering through the windows, a barking dog inside seeming to connote trouble, underlined by the shaky, jittery camera rooted to Ben’s level. It proves a bit of a dodge, as the home is Ben’s and the dog is too, though these dueling aesthetics nevertheless foreshadow the film to come, one in which cozy domesticity is so close yet so far away, with mother and son acting as if they are in the throes of it even if the rest of the film evinces how hard it is to attain. And while there might be a bit too much ginning up of drama, particularly toward the end, for my taste, “Ben Is Back” succeeds not just because of its two ace leading performances but because it ultimately opts for hard-to-accept truth rather than having it both ways.

Although the narrative gradually pieces together the trials bringing Ben to this point, the precariousness of his plight is nevertheless felt straight away in the movie’s air, how upon being let into the family home his sister Ivy (Kathryn Newton) keeps her distance, sending covert, fraught texts to her and Ben’s stepdad, Neal (Courtney B. Vance), while Julia Roberts’s famous mega-watt movie star smile is cleverly employed as something else, a frozen-in-place grin oozing forced enthusiasm, blocking out all the obvious perils connected to her son’s unexpected return, choosing only to see what’s good, or what she believes to be good about it. Hedges, meanwhile, his character chattering away about what he’s learned in rehab and repeatedly citing talking points from his sponsor, deftly toes the line so you can’t quite tell if he’s just full of it or energetic in that way that people sometimes are when they are trying so hard to both change and be on their best behavior. Gradually, both Hedges and the movie, which was written and directed by Hedges’s dad Peter, peel back layers to show that both things are true.

The manner “Ben Is Back” peels back those layers, alas, can sometimes feel a bit too dramatically contrived, with all sorts of telegraphed events setting up just so to engender the ending, while also occasionally evoking something more akin to an action-adventure film, such as when Ivy and her laptop briefly transform the proceedings into “Mission: Impossible”. Even so, there is something emotionally affecting about how all these machinations force Holly to confront the truth about her son, that he was genuinely a bad person when under the awful spell of drugs, and though you might occasionally find yourself wondering if she would keep pressing forward so deep into the unknown as those aforementioned dramatic contrivances grow bigger, well, that aforementioned frozen smile is all the backstory you need to believe she would. There is an almost paralyzing sense of mother love here, so much so that she finds herself lying to the other half of her family, in effect becoming her son, even if you wish Peter Hedges might have pushed the consequences of these dubious ethics a little bit more.

Movies in this vein tend to conclude by either leaning too far into easy sentimentality or cheap cynicism, and while both potential avenues are glimpsed, whether it’s a wrap-up, while foreshadowed, hueing a little too close to an episode of “Lassie” or Ben’s plight taking the turn you are expecting all along, “Ben is Back” threads the needle. It manages this feat by transforming the mother/son quest not into a solution for the whole problem but rather a cosmic means waking them up to the next step for their reality.

Let Julia & George Read from the Phone Book

Talking about paying to see a favorite actor read from the phone book is as familiar a form of praise ruing plot holes you could drive a truck through or condemning dialogue by asking who talks like that in real life? are familiar forms of criticism. These are all things people just say without genuinely scrutinizing their inherent meaning, which is why one of the New Yorker’s film critics, Richard Brody, wondered recently on Twitter if anyone really had sat down on a screen and read from a phone book. Of course, as several people replied, this sort of apocryphal idiom has been tried.

Morgan Freeman and Charles Bernstein, the poet, have read from the yellow pages for amusement’s sake, and apparently the late Robin Williams impersonated John Houseman on SCTV doing that very thing. And after minimal digging on Google I discovered that PRX had an entire series where actors John Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham, among others, read from the Manhattan white pages. But all these are essentially glorified Funny or Die sketches, meant to check in and check out of, have a few laughs over, and then move on. I dare say, however, that Mr. Brody was thinking about seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context, just as I too have always dreamed bout seeing someone read from the phone book in a different sort of context.

Just recently on this very blog I proffered my un-researched, un-verified belief that Steven Soderbergh makes bets either with himself or others to see if he can pull off certain arduous aesthetic tasks in his movies. Like finding a fresh way to implement “Take Me Home Country Roads” in “Logan Lucky”, or shooting a film on an iPhone, or, and this is my favorite urban legend that only I have posited and believe, that on the set of “Ocean’s Twelve” George Clooney bet Soderbergh that the director could not make a scene of the entire eponymous gang just sitting in a jail cell interesting.

That’s how we wound up with that scene where Soderbergh whip pans from actor to actor in the jail cell, each pan triggered by one actor looking at the actor sitting next to him after taking a moment to ruminate, by which I mean taking a moment to just sit there and, like, you know, actor-ize. It’s inane; it’s wonderful. What’s more, I also loved “Ocean’s Twelve” because Soderbergh is one of the few directors we have who has actually recognized and seized upon the explosive chemistry shared by Clooney and Julia Roberts, and that brings me to this post’s overriding point.

Years later, when tomes are written about this period in Hollywood, this age of brands and franchises and spandex, historians will read and rub their eyes, and re-read incredulously and then ask: “Wait, what? Julia Roberts and George Clooney were only in THREE movies together? What were these studio idiots thinking?” The old Star Machine had a lot of problems – A LOT OF PROBLEMS – but Mayer, Zukor, Zanuck, any of ‘em would have took one look at Jules and George and know exactly what to do. We would’ve had a spate of Jules & George movies, and if a few of ‘em would have undoubtedly been rushed and slapped together and awful, so many more of ‘em would have been brilliant fun, and a couple, if not a couple more, would have been A+ master classes of cheery entertainment. That none of these movies actually exist is an unfathomable artistic blight on our era; shame on all of us.

I appreciate experimental Steven Soderbergh, and understand that his experimentation is crucial to keeping his artistic battery charged, but I confess, the more genre-oriented, populist-ish Soderbergh has always been my favorite Steven. (This blog’s favorite 2017 movie, after all, was “Logan Lucky.”) And so I wish the latter Steven Soderbergh would find time to concoct a Jules & George trilogy leaning hard into Golden Age screwball, rom-com-ish machinations, not functioning so much as homages as the director’s own semi-avant garde recipe. And I wish one of those movies would be about, say, a pair of bickering but in love con artists. And I wish that during production, in some remote locale, Clooney and Soderbergh would he forced to make a dinner reservation by finding the restaurant’s phone number in the phone book. And I wish that upon doing this, Clooney would say to Soderbergh: “Bet you can’t make a scene reading from the phone book interesting.” And I wish Soderbergh would then take Clooney’s bet and concoct a scene where the characters played by Julia and George discover their lavish south of France home is bugged by Interpol. And I wish that upon discovering this, to occupy and/or have fun with the hapless Interpol lackeys, the characters played by Julia and George would spend infinite hours just reading the phone book aloud.