George Clooney: Doing Good

Oscar winner George Clooney may be the sexiest man alive according to People magazine, but these days he is winning rave reviews not for his matinee idol good looks or his acting, but for his diplomacy. The 45-year-old movieland heart-throb has turned himself into a diplomat extraordinaire, recently traveling with his father, Nick Clooney, to Darfur to highlight the horrors of genocide and its attendant tragedy — starving children and poverty that is grinding that nation into the dust.

When he arrived in the stricken African nation, he did so with camera in hand to chronicle the terrible fate that has befallen families there and to help publicize the need for international attention and relief. Since his return, he’s spoken to the United Nations and used press conferences and interviews originally designed to promote his latest film to highlight the plight of Darfur.

"I’m not about to give up my acting job for this," he says, "but I hope what little I can do will have some effect. People, perhaps unfortunately, pay attention to movie stars — wherever I go cameras follow so the least I can do is use that to draw attention to something that is really important."

Clooney is a bona fide international star and he, more than most, knows how to have a good time. He bought himself a grand villa on Lake Como for precisely that purpose, but his dedication to Darfur and its struggling people is no dilettantish exercise. He is serious about Darfur.

As the star of movies like Batman and Robin, (of course he was Batman) Three Kings, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Oceans ll, Syriana, (for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar in 2005), and his current film, The Good German, he is as hot as an actor can be these days. But always in his mind, he says, is the understanding that fame is fleeting.

"I know you have to take advantage of success because it never lasts," he notes. Clooney says he has only to look at the career of his late aunt, the legendary singer/actress Rosemary Clooney, to see that show business can be a total rollercoaster. "One day she was queen — the next she was down. It had nothing to do with her immense talent. It’s that the public is fickle. So I know I may be riding high one day, gone a week later."

His career has been a slow build, but for now, at least, he seems to supply something Hollywood desperately needs — an old-fashioned, masculine man’s man in the Clark Gable/Gary Cooper mold. His new movie, The Good German, shot in black and white, tells the story of a military journalist who goes to Berlin after the end of World War II and gets caught up in a murder mystery involving a former lover played by Cate Blanchett. It’s a bit of a throwback to the Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman Casablanca era and Clooney admits it’s something of an homage.

"Although it was a dark story it was fun," insists Clooney. "Well, listen, it’s never fun to be shooting at night in the rain, but it was always fun to be in that movie. The plane and Cate, the whole thing was really great. Those are the kinds of nights where you drive home with the sun coming up and you think, ’Well, that was wonderful.’ You don’t get to do that very often in your life."

Clooney, who directed himself in another black and white, Oscar-nominated movie, Good Night and Good Luck, says he doesn’t expect The Good German to be a giant hit. "We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time we have pushing to get films we think are interesting made as opposed to the other kind. We want to aim a little higher than the low bar."

Clooney admits he’s a great fan of Hollywood’s bygone era — the halcyon days when Bogart, John Garfield, Gable, and Spencer Tracy ruled. "I know all those films backwards and forwards, all of them, and especially the films from the ’40s and early ’50s."

He says Good German director Steven Soderbergh made him watch lots of ’50’s movies. "He wanted us to just sort of get that rhythm. So we talked about films like Humoresque. I think that John Garfield is a really interesting character that people don’t really talk about that much. I watched Out of the Past with [Robert] Mitchum. I watched a lot of films like that just to get a sense of that kind of a guy, but I really know those characters really well and have watched those films my whole life."

Clooney says The Good German is not a message movie. "I remember when we were shooting it the thought was it depends on where we are politically at the time whether it was a film about how to screw up an occupation or not. But we didn’t really think about that because I don’t think our film is about that. It’s more about how we were pardoning war criminals, which is the more interesting part. I don’t think that we did much of that in this last one. So they’re not very similar in terms of making a political statement."

And as for his own, more overt, political work — that too will continue, he says. "I still have a lot of work to do in Darfur. I’ve still got a couple of places that I’m going to go where I’m going to talk to a couple of heads of state. There is a lot of work to be done there and it’s a long, long haul and a lot of people are going to get killed before that gets done. I want to keep that in the foreground of the things that I’m doing besides the film industry." — Ivor Davis