It’s impossible to talk about George Clooney’s career and films without talking about the past—about Hollywood history, about the idea of Hollywood royalty. In the best George Clooney movies, he exudes retro, genteel charm in a modern age defined by aloof, left-on-read cool. The films he’s made as a director tend toward the nostalgic, lovingly evoking American history and old Hollywood; as a screen presence, Clooney himself can remind you of Cary Grant or Clark Gable, depending on the project.
This show business shit is in his blood: His father Nick was an old school entertainment-industry jobber, a DJ turned midwest television personality whose sister was the songstress Rosemary Clooney. You get the impression from profiles and interviews that Clooney was born to entertain—that if he’d never become famous, he’d be charming the fuck out of little old ladies while hosting bingo night in an Augusta, Kentucky church basement. It is not novel to observe that Clooney just as easily could’ve found his calling in politics (and kind of did).
He’d worked, without much success, from the early ‘80s through the early ‘90s; crucially; he was in his mid-30s when he finally broke through on ER, an NBC drama from the age when network television still had a stranglehold on the monoculture. If he projected maturity the moment he showed up onscreen as Doug Ross, it might have been the graying hair—or the sense that he’d been around and encountered resistance by the time we made his acquaintance. Maybe that’s why he seems to command admiration and respect from everyone he comes into contact with, even if it’s ten Hollywood stars robbing a casino at his direction. He’s an inexplicably humble and self-effacing adult at the table in a youth-worshipping culture.
He’s an (almost) always-game pro, a perfect dynamic weapon on screen, a force of seductive charisma and intellectual curiosity, an ubermensch you’d love to buy a drink. His characters are charmed guys; even if their lives are hopelessly messy, they attract men who want to be them and women who want to fuck them. They’re often confidence men who innately understand their power and how to wield it. He smirks sometimes, but he never sneers. He radiates humility, an expert at making you feel not just comfortable but in on some invigorating conspiracy with him. Clooney is simultaneously Superman and Clark Kent without the need for tights or spectacles. It’s made him the definitional, bankable star of his era, who didn’t need much of an IP boost to build a resumé of incredible films and rack up one Oscar win and several nominations en route to a first-ballot Hall of Fame career.
Clooney’s new film with Noah Baumbach, Jay Kelly, is his most overt interrogation of stardom—what defines it, the impact it has on people who possess it, and how it impacts the people in that star’s orbit. It leverages everything we know about Clooney as a screen presence and an offscreen personality—let’s just say the assonant Uma/Oprah syllable-match of George Clooney/Jay Kelly is not a coincidence—and it builds to a meta-flashback moment seemingly designed to remind us of the depth and breadth of Clooney’s legacy.