George Clooney was robbed of the Oscar for Best Actor. Two years ago.
Clooney, one of the Best Actor nominees in last Sunday's Oscars for his deft and uncharacteristically vulnerable portrayal of Matt King in Alexander Payne’sThe Descendants, stands at an interesting point in his career. Despite being universally recognized as one of the most prominent movie stars and suave bachelors on the planet for many years now, Clooney may finally be heading towards acceptance as an actor who can believably give life to exposed, flawed, everyday people. Though many might credit this transition to The Descendants, two former Clooney characters paved the way for Matt King: corporate axeman Ryan Bingham and one decidedly fantastic Mr. Fox.
Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, two movies starring George Clooney that were released within a month of each other in 2009, depicted the deconstruction of their respective protagonist’s self-assurance and command over his world. As the voice of Mr. Fox, Clooney skillfully maneuvered his character from a confident, self-centered bandit to a sensitive and sentimental family man. His most vulnerable moment? Being slapped by his angry, disappointed wife for refusing to recognize that though he may be a wild animal, he is also a husband and a father.
However, Mr. Fox alone doesn’t fully illustrate Clooney’s transformation. After all, he was only ever a Plasticine model. As Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air, Clooney achieved what by all accounts should have been impossible: persuading an audience to feel sympathy for a man whose job is to fire people during a terrible recession. Through a budding romance with a fellow road warrior, Bingham watches his playboy fantasy fall from the sky. His most vulnerable moment? A heartbreaking phone conversation during which his love interest informs him that she only ever saw him as a parenthesis, an exotic vacation from her real life.
This is not to say that Clooney himself has changed, but his onscreen persona — the recurring character that is George Clooney — definitely has. Anytime a celebrity has as much star power as Clooney, it is hard to see his performance in a film as independent of his pop culture identity. But, in the past few years Clooney has proved that he is capable of far more than our former understanding of him would have let on. Because of that, he has earned the right to be viewed and judged with a healthy amount of detachment from his celebrity.
We've seen his transformation in Up in the Air and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and the result of that transformation in The Descendants. Hopefully now we can move past viewing his roles for the extent to which they are a departure or new territory and see them simply for their individual merit. Clooney is a phenomenal actor, and I hope his loss this past Sunday will free him up to take on any role, whether it be cool Clooney, vulnerable Clooney, or anywhere in between, without being scrutinized for making that choice.