George Clooney is Venice's poster boy. At one of the bars, there's even a sandwich named after him, the George Crudey (prosciutto crudo and cheese). After summering in his castle on Lake Como, the smooth star chugs in to grace the film festival every year, giving it a Nespresso shot of Hollywood glamour and a dose of good grace as he smiles through the indignities of the press conferences.
During last week's packed assembly, an Italian man got the mic, stood up and pulled his trousers down to reveal underpants on which had been written "George, pick me" across the crotch. "I wanted him to come out as gay," explained the fan, to police, later.
George loves helping Venice get publicity but I doubt he'd ever choose to reveal such news here on the Lido. Instead, usually accompanied by a beautiful woman (this time, Italian TV presenter Elisabetta Canalis, very aptly named for Venice), he unveils his latest films. In 2005, Good Night, and Good Luck premiered here, the film Clooney co-wrote with Grant Heslov, and now he's helped out Heslov by starring in his directing debut, absurd comedy The Men Who Stare at Goats
Adapted from the book by the journalist Jon Ronson, it also stars Ewan McGregor as a naive journalist who meets Clooney on the way to Iraq and uncovers a secret division of the US army which uses psychic powers to defeat the enemy, allows its soldiers to take drugs and grow long hair and is run by the dude of all dudes, Jeff Bridges.
Although the film begins with the legend "More of this is true than you might believe", it doesn't excuse the fact that it isn't funny. Heslov never gets the tone right and the result is faintly disastrous. I think the stars know it too, as they ham it up with increasing desperation, Clooney resorting to the moustache he often wears to signal he's doing light comedy and McGregor trading on in-jokes about being a Jedi warrior. Kevin Spacey appears halfway through, also sporting a comedy moustache.
Doing comedy about war is always difficult and I applaud the attempt to challenge the po-faced seriousness of all other Iraq war films (Brian de Palma's Redacted, for example, won here a couple of years ago) but it needs a better script and director than here and much more than famous people mocking their fabulous iconic famousness by wearing moustaches.
Satirising American corporate greed, The Informant! is produced by Clooney, directed by Steven Soderbergh and stars their Ocean's pal Matt Damon wearing, would you believe, a comedy moustache. He plays a whistle blower who betrays his company to the FBI for fixing the price of lysine in high-fructose corn syrup.
Although it's supposed to be breezy comedy (check out that titular exclamation mark!) in the mould of, say, Catch Me If You Can, it's even more boring on screen than it sounds on the page. Soderbergh's normally nimble direction is all over the place and despite being accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch's first movie score since 1996, the jazzy jokiness of it all quickly becomes tiresome.
So the 66th Venice film festival was actually way more successful when it was being serious. Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story is rather brilliant in its emotive, folksy way. It explains the financial crisis in human terms as Moore goes about middle America watching people being evicted. A typical piece of Moore irony is to find, among all the businesses struggling to stay afloat, a sign company saved by the increased orders from estate agents for signs saying: Foreclosure.
Just as his health service doc Sicko had the grandstanding stunt of getting Americans treated by Cuban doctors, Moore now waddles down to Wall Street to make a citizen's arrest of the CEOs of the big banks. Turned away by bemused security guards, he proceeds to wrap the entire area in yellow "crime scene" tape, like some anti-capitalist Christo installation. When Moore accused the American bankers of being like the Mafia, the Italian audience with whom I saw the film went wild, as they did at the end, greeting the film with the loudest cheers I've ever heard here.
They were pretty impressed, too, with Oliver Stone's excitable journey through the current political reformers of South America in his wildly unfocused but intriguing documentary, South of the Border. Having hung out with Fidel Castro in 2003, Stone now spends some pleasant days in the company of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, getting the man America believes to be a dictator to lark about on a bicycle and talk, misty-eyed, of peaceful Bolivarian revolution. The film's another anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist ode and a salute to the increasingly independent politics of countries who are at last electing "leaders who look like their people".
My favourite film of the selection also dealt with colonialism: Claire Denis's White Material, featuring a superb performance by Isabelle Huppert as a coffee plantation owner in an unnamed African country standing her ground in distressing denial as both rebel forces and government troops close in. With her excellent 35 Shots of Rum still on release in the UK, I can't think of a film-maker more "on their game" at the moment than Claire Denis. Her sensual instinct for place and character is unmatched in world cinema.
Israeli film Lebanon also impressed, set entirely within the confines of a tank on the first day of the 1982 war, the panicked young soldiers inside viewing the outside only through the gun's viewfinder. I liked Italian film La doppia ora, too, a cool thriller about a hotel maid, a security guard and an art heist that could soon become a sleeper hit like France's Tell No One, or a Hollywood remake, or both.
Perhaps the big surprise of Venice was the stylish control of fashion designer Tom Ford's film debut. A Single Man, adapted from the Christopher Isherwood book, boasts the best and most handsome performance of Colin Firth's career, a lovely turn by Julianne Moore and quite a few young men with their tops off.
The film is tasteful and touching, the story of Firth's gay English professor in 1960s Los Angeles, mourning the death of his lover (Mattthew Goode). The cinematography by Eduard Grau fades in and out of high colour, like a hot blush, and among the many style references I was reminded of: Edward Weston's photos of Tina Modotti, Joseph Losey's Accident, Bruce Weber's Let's Get Lost and Tom Kalin's Savage Grace, which are all very good things to be reminded of. Ford's film thus signalled a cool end to a sunny, quality edition of Venice.
