CLOONEY AND KIDS
New film raises questions about fatherhood.
George Clooney has been dealing with inquiring minds since his ER days on TV. Reporters’ questions used to focus on who the eligible bachelor was dating. But since his recent marriage to human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, Clooney is coping with the inevitable parenthood question.
Whatever, the 54-year-old always handles the personal digging the same way: He sidesteps it with a passive-aggressive scolding.
That’s exactly what he does when he’s asked about fatherhood during a pre-Mother’s Day media conference for the Disney sci-fi film Tomorrowland.
“I knew you were going to get to it somehow,” says Clooney, smirking. “I didn’t think you’d go the Mother’s Day route. I thought you’d do, ‘There’s a little kid (in Tomorrowland) who’s you as a young boy. Does it make you feel like you could have a little boy?’
“But no, you went, ‘ You have a mother, and most of us have mothers, and wouldn’t you like to be a father?’ Go back and tell everyone you asked the question. But thank you for asking.”
After the cheeky no-comment, Clooney is a great deal more forthcoming in discussing Tomorrowland.
In the movie, he plays the grown-up version of a former boy genius inventor who joins a teen (Britt Robertson) on a mission to uncover save-the-world secrets that exist in another dimension. Yes, the film might be named after a Disney theme park attraction, but it tackles some important issues regarding mankind’s future.
“Putting me in a summer movie is a very bold thought,” Clooney says, but adds more seriously: “Listen, first and foremost, I think it’s a really bold thing for Disney to be willing to do a film that is not a sequel and that is not a comic book, and to truly invest in a summer film of this sort of ilk.”
When the Oscar-honoured actor and director was first approached to play the Tomorrowland role, he hesitated — but only for a bit.
“When I opened up a description of the character — 55-yearold has-been — I go, ‘Wait, hang on, which part am I reading for?’ ” says Clooney.
“He’s a former genius, a boy genius, who has gotten bitter in his old age.”
Actually, the actor champions the positive message in Tomorrowland. “What I love about (Tomorrowland) is that it speaks to the idea that your future is not pre-ordained and pre-destined, and if you’re involved, a single voice can make a difference.”
In other words, he is an optimist who survived the threat of nuclear war during an everchanging time in his 1960s and 1970s youth.
“There were an awful lot of things going on that you felt you could change,” says Clooney. “I grew up in an era where the voice, the power of the one, really did feel as if it mattered.
“We had the riots that are reminiscent of the things we are looking at today, but we had the civil rights movement and we had Vietnam, and we had the women’s rights movement, and all those things that you felt you could actually have some part of changing.”
Certainly, Clooney has tried to make a difference. He’s an active member of the Not on Our Watch Project, which attempts to prevent atrocities. He helped organize the telethon Hope for Haiti, raised money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights and other social issues, and continues to be a strong lobbyist for Save Darfur.
“I think there’s a funny thing about careers in a strange way, which is, as you’re working, you find that as time goes by you become more comfortable in your career path, and you’re able to focus on other things and other people,” Clooney says. “When you are in this line of work where there’s a lot of attention focused on you that you don’t really need, you try to turn that focus and put it on places that matter to me, like in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Serious stuff, but he admits he keeps it loose on set, especially when filming Tomorrowland in and around Vancouver. Rumour has it he managed to entertain cast and crew with his performances of The Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight.
“My rapping skills are wellknown,” he says. “In fact, many of the great rappers today have fashioned their stylings from me. I was 18 when The Sugarhill Gang hit the scene, and so it’s funny because I’m literally at the actual oldest age of anybody who knows those songs.”
Timing is the motivation for his performances, apparently.
“We’re in the water, and it’s cold, and we’re shooting 14 hours, and we’ve been out all night, and it’s terrible,” Clooney says. “What could be worse? And then I rap.”
Tomorrowland
Rating:
Starring: George Clooney, Britt Robertson, Hugh Laurie
Directed by: Brad Bird
Running time: 130 minutes
Most people stop believing they can imagine their way to happiness sometime around their eighth birthday.
Apparently that’s been our trouble all along. In the future of Tomorrowland, the world is in a sorry state: forests are scorched, cities are drowning, civilization lies in ruins.
But there remains hope for us yet. All we need to avert global catastrophe, Tomorrowland cheerfully explains, is a cando attitude and a bit of imagination. And, of course, certain freedoms for the imaginative among us from the red tape of bureaucracy. I can think of another epic about visionary individuals dreaming up a utopia while accosted by the pesky government. It’s called Atlas Shrugged. I bet Ayn Rand would like Tomorrowland just fine. Six years before Don Draper channelled the spirit of Esalen into “Buy the World a Coke,” Pepsi-Cola paired with Walt Disney to devise an even more infectious jingle, It’s a Small World, which they foisted on an unsuspecting public at the World’s Fair in 1964.
Tomorrowland opens and soon reveals its ulterior design: A trap door plunges those selected into a secret underground chamber, where, as a young stowaway named Frank Walker (Thomas Robinson) discovers, the future awaits. Yes, it seems Disney’s well-known animatronic attraction was merely a cover for some kind of interdimensional portal — a great glass elevator meant to whisk a chosen few to their new objectivist paradise. The very moment our plucky hero Frank arrives, he runs afoul of some robots and, because the future ought to be exciting, stumbles into a ludicrous jetpack chase.
Meanwhile, in present-day Middle America, an even pluckier young hero is being vetted for Tomorrowland recruitment. That would be Casey (Britt Robertson), who speaks mainly in epigrams and dresses like a mid-’80s Spielberg character. In an astonishingly original development, Casey is both a brilliant and troubled teen, wowing parents and teachers alike with her intellectual prowess at the same time that she runs into trouble with the law. She proves formidable enough to win herself the favour of Athena (Raffey Cassidy), Tomorrowland’s robotic headhunter. And so begins another precocious moppet’s voyage to the beyond.
Released from jail after the failure of her latest round of public vandalism, Casey finds among her belongings a small brooch with an unusual power: Touching it seems to teleport her into some shimmering Oz-like idyll, very real to her but invisible to everyone else. Research brings Casey to a science-fiction novelty store in another town, where nefarious androids (what else?) shoot lasers until Athena shows up and rather extravagantly fights them off.
But it takes an awfully long time for Tomorrowland to arrange its players and for the story proper to get underway — and in fact the movie’s more than halfway over by the time it finally does. Fleeing from the aftermath of their now-eviscerated animatronic foes, Casey exhorts her saviour to explain a few things. Athena obliges, but what she divulges is even more confusing: The future is in peril, she says, but why? It’s about this time that George Clooney appears, playing Frank Walker as a grown man. His purpose is mainly to explain things — many, many things. Rarely has a film relied so much on tedious dialogue for clarification.
That story, as far as I can tell, is vaguely cautionary: A wealthy, idealistic industrialist gathered the most talented and creative people in the world and shuttled them, somehow, to an alternate dimension, where together they constructed a futuristic steampunk Arcadia unmolested by the whims of politicians. But then instead of inviting the populace to share in the newly minted paradise, its architect, David Nix (Hugh Laurie), shut the gates.
Tomorrowland aspires to galvanize its audience — to inspire them to effect positive change. But in the end, it’s like telling somebody with depression that they could get over it if they’d only cheer up a little.