Photo: Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty Images
Last year’s Venice Film Festival saw the premiere of Jay Kelly, in which George Clooney plays a movie star who travels to Italy to get a lifetime-achievement award from a prestigious film festival. This year’s festival turned that fantasy into reality, inviting the real George Clooney to the Lido so he could receive Venice’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. As many people, including Clooney, noted, Wednesday night’s opening ceremony was essentially autofiction in reverse — a film that had been loosely inspired by Clooney’s life was now influencing events in his actual life.
But before Clooney’s big moment, the ceremony had to get ceremonial. Our hosts for the evening were actors Greta Scarano and Nicolas Maupas, who vaguely resemble Ana de Armas and Sombr, respectively. The pair performed a cute bit in which Scarano spoke about how cinema was meant to “foster dialogue and listening,” and Maupas kept interrupting her — a reminder that stage patter truly is the same everywhere you go. Next, Italian singer Tutti Fenomeni came out to perform a power ballad called “Love Is Not Enough,” which featured lyrics about our “mundane Newtonian universe” and a reference to “German concentration camps” per the official translation. Maybe it was more tasteful in the original Italian?
Then, just like JFK Jr. did in the ’90s, it was time to celebrate George. Jay Kelly ends with a sequence in which the movie star watches a montage of clips from his career assembled from real footage of Clooney’s 30-year filmography. It would have been pretty funny if Venice had just played that, but it made its own montage instead. It began, naturally, with that clip from Jay Kelly, which meant we were watching Clooney watch himself. In the corner, a live feed showed the current Clooney taking it all in, so we could watch him watch himself watch himself. The montage was devoted to his many eras. One segment focused on George Clooney the action star. (The Peacemaker got a surprising amount of play; Batman & Robin did not.) Another was devoted to George Clooney as a romantic lead. We got to see him gaze longingly at Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, and Michelle Pfeiffer. The montage ended bizarrely, with a clip of Clooney drifting into space to die in the film Gravity.
Presenting the trophy was Laura Dern, Clooney’s longtime friend and co-star in the unreleased ’80s horror film Grizzly II: Revenge. Dern explained that she had queried Hollywood bigwigs for memories and tributes. Steven Soderbergh gave her a story about passing out at Clooney’s 40th-birthday party, an embarrassing moment the star smoothed over with his trademark aplomb. Adam Sandler complimented Clooney on being so skinny. Alexander Payne compared the experience of meeting Clooney to meeting Clark Gable or Cary Grant. (Dern herself compared him to Gregory Peck, whom she met when she was young.) Brad Pitt said Clooney “ages as gracefully as an old Gouda.” He continued, “The pigeon-toed kid from Kentucky is now an elder statesman, who, when you can’t get Brad Pitt, you know will show up because he never met an award he wouldn’t run to.”
(This was, by my count, the second of three separate references made to Clooney’s Kentucky origins at Venice on Wednesday. In his acceptance speech, Clooney explained he never had a big plan for his career: “For the most part, I was just trying to avoid moving back to Kentucky to cut tobacco, which is what I used to do.” And at the press conference that afternoon, he explained that he was never one of those actors who prefers to hang out in their trailer: “I’m from Kentucky; we tried to stay out of trailers.”)
Receiving a lifetime-achievement award can be awkward. For a recipient in their 80s, it’s a reminder they could be about to die. For a recipient in their 60s, it’s notice they’re past their prime. “When they tell you you’re gonna be getting a lifetime achievement award, there are two things that come to mind,” Clooney said. “The first is, what an incredible honor this is. The second is, do you know something I don’t? Have you been talking to my doctor?” In his press conference, Clooney was asked whether he felt any melancholy about getting older. “I’m 65,” he joked. “Everything is melancholy.” You’re offered different types of roles, he said, and you have different priorities. (Now that he has young children, for instance, directing must take a backseat.) To lighten some of this awkwardness, Dern suggested Clooney’s award be re-titled the “mid-lifetime achievement award.” Then, in 20 years, George could come back to Venice and receive a second trophy.
Taking the stage to accept the Golden Lion, Clooney complimented Dern on her professionalism and height. He noted that nothing about his career had been intentional — just “a series of happy accidents … a director saw something in me that I was yet to see. A writer wrote better lines than I deserved. A crew member made me look like I knew what I was doing. Over time, you begin to realize that nobody arrives anywhere on their own.”
He ended with another of his favorite messages, on the power of storytelling. “The first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians,” he said. “They’re journalists who ask questions. Artists who refuse simple answers … Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear. Movies don’t stop wars. They don’t lower inflation. They don’t fix elections. But they do do something remarkable: They remind us that a stranger is never just a stranger. That he might be the hero in someone else’s story. And if we can sit together in the dark and care about people we have never met, I think maybe we’ll be okay.”
This rousing tribute to the free press, delivered by the son of a journalist, was followed by the world premiere of Danny Boyle’s Ink, a film about how the journalists at British tabloid The Sun ended up debasing our entire society. Never say Venice has no sense of humor.
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