The Trump effect
George Clooney tweaks Suburbicon in aftermath of election
Donald Trump is the reason Josh Brolin was cut from Suburbicon.
The dark comedy was written by the Coen brothers, and by Grant Heslov and George Clooney, who also helped produce it. Clooney directed the film, which is set to open Oct. 27.
They started shooting in the fall of 2016, about a month before Election Day, during some of candidate Trump’s incendiary campaign remarks. “This is when we were hearing that Mexicans were rapists, and scapegoating minorities of any form,” Clooney recalls.
Clooney had remarked at the Cannes film festival in May that Trump would never be president, so the results of Nov. 8 surprised him. “It changed the temperature on the film,” he says. “The goofy scenes were too goofy.”
One of those scenes involves Brolin as a foul-mouthed, gonzo baseball coach in the white-bread 1950s setting. “It became apparent that that’s not going to fit in this film any more,” says Clooney. “It felt like things were darker and angrier.”
He also decided to tone down the comic aspect of the film’s villains. “The Coen brothers wrote them very similar to the guys in Fargo, doing some pretty slapstick stuff. There was a bus chase. We shot it but, again, it felt like we were putting the camera in the wrong place. It felt like we were in the wrong room.”
Suburbicon may have been affected more than most productions by the election results, but it’s hardly the only new release to feel the irony of a populist (and increasingly unpopular), leader in the White House.
The Leisure Seeker, opening in January, tells the story of an older couple (Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland), who go on one last road trip in their rusty Winnebago. Sutherland’s character is suffering from dementia, and at one point gets caught up in the excitement of a Trump rally, forgetting he’s a lifelong Democrat.
“None of us knew what was going to happen,” Mirren says of the scene. “Maybe this was going to be an interesting blip on the landscape of American politics — or as it turned out to be, much more than a blip, a profound sea change in American politics. But we didn’t know that at the time.”
The film was also the Englishlanguage debut of Italian director Paolo Virzi. “I think Paolo saw it as a sort of curiosity, as an outsider,” says Mirren: “Politics as a sporting event.”
Then there’s Battle of the Sexes, which dramatizes the famous 1973 tennis match between a 29-year-old Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, who was then 55. Shooting during 2016, co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris could not have been unaware of the possible zeitgeist connection with a nation on the brink of electing its first female president. Instead, it plays out as a sad what-if echo.
Given the slow speed with which movies are made, many of the Trumpian overtones in new releases are mere coincidences. Films often deal with political divides, racism and conflict, and an uptick in all these areas makes them seem more prescient than they are.
It doesn’t diminish their relevance, however, as when director Joe Wright introduced his Churchill drama Darkest Hour at the Toronto International Film Festival with a not-so-veiled reference to the new Nazis that must be resisted. Or when an upcoming film celebrates the 1970s FBI whistleblower nicknamed Deep Throat (Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House), even as the current FBI and White House are increasingly at odds.
Clooney is bearish on the role of movies in modern politics, however. “I don’t think films can tell people what to think, and I don’t think films can lead anything because it just takes too long to make them,” he says. “All the President’s Men came out in ‘76. That was two years after Watergate, and basically everything had been put to bed. What films can do is ... point to a moment in time ... and tell you what you were thinking. I think that’s about the best you can hope for.”
Don’t tell that to Michael Moore, who has a film in production called Fahrenheit 11/9 (a reference to the calendar date when the election results became final), which he claims will help bring down the president. The film is loosely scheduled for a 2018 release, and details are scant.
Moore’s last film, the similarly secret Where to Invade Next, had its world premiere at the Toronto festival in 2015, but fizzled on release. But it should also be noted that Moore penned an essay four months before the election titled Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win. That’s more than Clooney knew.