As a fan of near-future science fiction, I’m eager to see Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, which looks like it’s going to be as much a psychological drama as a science fiction movie:

It’s very easy to skip forward into a fully-established brave (or not-so-brave) new world, to 2161 when Starfleet Academy is up and running, for Rick Grimes to wake up in the hospital after the zombie apocalypse has already run its course, for Katniss to live in a District 12 that treats whatever cataclysm that dramatically reduced the human population of the United States and brought it under the dictatorial authority of the Capitol as an even that’s distant beyond memory.

But so much of the really interesting science fiction, particularly of the last few years, has been set at inflection points instead, rather than in the world those seminal moments produced. Max Brooks’ World War Z was a fascinating and refreshing spin on zombie apocalypse not because his zombies were fast or slow or some hybrid thereof, but because it was about people improvising, and learning, and making terrible sacrifices and awful mistakes to respond to a phenomenon that challenges everything they knew about the world. District 9 had the good sense to imagine the social consequences of an alien invasion, and to suggest that human unity in response to the revelation that there was life on other planets could make us seem as ugly as the giant insects marooned in Johannesburg. And Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion is about a moment when we could have careened on over into a plague-scarred wasteland, but yanked ourselves back from the bring by discipline and chance instead.

Gravity may not be even that futuristic, though Cuaron’s work on Children of Men makes me hope he’s doing at least some world-building here. But however far away from our own time its set, it’s exciting to see a science fiction that isn’t set in a world where we’ve established full control of the stars, and where the future retains some of that bigness and risk.

Whatever I’ve thought of the last couple of movies that George Clooney’s made, his response to rumors that he’s gay is amazing—particularly given how Hollywood used to handle that kind of gossip. He told The Advocate:

I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, “These are lies!” That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community. I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing. My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay? I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a shit.

That kind of pure confidence, or the ability to buss Billy Crystal in the Academy Awards’ opening skit without making it a joke that relies on a “gross! Two dudes kissing” reaction:

is welcome, and something we could use a lot more of. We think of Hollywood as this bastion of liberalism, but we’re not that far removed from a time when Rock Hudson was revealed to be gay only after he died of AIDS-related complications. And we’re still in a time when movies and television shows starring gay people are events. Given comments and actions like these, it’d be awfully nice to see Clooney extend his auteur project, break out of his pattern of Tortured But Honorable Heterosexual Dudes and insist that you can both be America’s Favorite Bachelor and play gay.

George Clooney was the actor who irritated me most in 2011: I thought The Descendants was a less-revealing-than-it-thought-it-was celebration of rich people, and the Ides of March fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics of politics, and was weirdly smug about that ignorance. But I think he gets something important right about celebrities who want to speak out about politics in this week’s issue of The Hollywood Reporter:

Through the years, he says he has learned to think carefully before he speaks out on issues, but that makes his commitment to some causes all the more courageous. His criticism of the war in Iraq made him a highly controversial figure in the early 2000s. “They did a half-hour show on Fox saying my career was over, and there was a cover of one of those magazines with the word ‘traitor’ written on it, and the White House was passing out a deck of weasels and I was on one of the cards,” he recalls. After initial anger, there was a brief moment when he felt afraid. “I called my dad and said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ And he said, ‘Grow up. You’ve got money. You’ve got a job. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, “But don’t say bad things about me.” ‘ And he was right.”

Even more precisely, I think it’s that you can’t expect both that your endorsement of a cause or position will mean something and then also expect that people will not react to that endorsement as if it carries weight. I don’t think that the only way for artists to be of service to their politics is for them to validate politicians and policies with their constituencies—they have independent ideas to offer about framing and policy. But recognizing, when you have a lot of power, that you speak from a privileged position, is always smart and classy.

If I was in possession of a large amount of extremely valuable and beautiful beachfront Hawaiian land that I wasn’t allowed to continue owning, and if I cared about my family’s legacy and the future of my state, I would have a number of options. I could sell it. I could work with the National Parks Service to set up the first National Seashore in Hawaii. I could collaborate with the Hawaii State Parks agency to preserve the land and make it accessible to people other than my family. I could spin it off into an independent charity. I could donate it into a university. I could sell some of it and purchase a small piece of it at market price to preserve as a family compound. Matt King, the wealthy lawyer portrayed by George Clooney in Alexander Payne’s smug The Descendants, considers only that first option. It’s a movie that ultimately argues that the highest moral cause is a rich man keeping what’s his. And that’s not the only thing that I disliked about the second painfully politically-misguided (and oddly out of touch) movie George Clooney gave us in 2011.

That conviction that Matt’s only options are turning the land into money or keeping it for himself doesn’t just give us a narrator who is painfully self-absorbed. It’s of a piece with the movie’s odd tendency to treat the land deal part of the plot as if it’s hugely momentous and then to dissipate all the tension surrounding it. There’s essentially no debate about what to do with the land because the positions of the family members who don’t want to sell are never articulated: it’s just asserted that there are people out there who would prefer to hold on to the land even though the law says they can’t. The closest thing there is to an argument is about whether to sell to a local developer or one based out of another state. We know that Matt thinks some of his relatives are shiftless spendthrifts who would prefer to take a higher price from the non-local developer, but no one on the other side talks about what it means to them to support the Hawaiian economy, or what, if any, responsibilities they feel they have to their state. They’re just bodies there to indicate that there are substantial votes on each side. And ultimately, the big decision we’ve been told has to be made at this family gathering is actually seven years away from its deadline and pushed aside until King can find another solution.

The same shallow approach applies to every other discussion of Hawaii’s economics in the movie. The Descendants deserves credit for getting lots of non-white people into the camera frame, often on planes next to Matt King’s head as he jumps from island to island. But the movie focuses most directly on native Hawaiians during Matt’s opening monologue, as illustrations of troubles in the paradise that he declares “can go fuck itself.” The vacant, the indigent? These are things that Matt King has to endure, along with his wife’s coma. If what makes one Hawaiian is a fondness for comfortable clothing and a sense of noblesse oblige without the oblige, there are regional and ethnic identities I’d be more interested in spending time exploring.
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The Ides of March, George Clooney’s adaptation of the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon, is the kind of movie that will be mistaken for a profound meditation on the state of American politics. This strikes me as deeply unfortunate, not just because it’s not a particularly good movie, but because what few ideas it has back up a reactionary idea of what makes someone good at governing. Spoilers to follow.

Gov. Mike Morris, the Democratic frontrunner, may be the silliest Hollywood conception of a politician since The American President. He is, apparently, a veteran of President Bush’s Gulf War, an opponent of President Bush’s son’s incursions into the same reason, a genius who’s managed to dramatically improve the educational performance of Pennsylvania students (take that, skeptics of education reform!) and balance his state’s budget in a recession. When he’s asked about how he’d feel about the death penalty if his wife (the always welcome but woefully under-used Jennifer Ehle) were murdered, Morris says he’d kill the killer himself and then accept the consequences. These are no positions that have a basis in political reality. If Andrew Shepherd’s speech and declaration of ACLU membership in The American President is a parody of liberal dreams of progressive toughness

the idea that a candidate could declare in a debate “I’m not a Christian…my religion, what i believe in, is called the Constitution of the United States of America,” and win over an electorate that isn’t even close to electing a Jewish president, that’s skeptical of a Mormon, much less an atheist, is just woefully out of touch. Saying, as one character does, that “we know they’ve nominated a jackass,” in response to a question about whether Democrats have nominated an atheist is not an answer to that plausibility problem. It’s just smug.

Morris is a paper man, composed of position papers rather than blood and guts, and that’s a problem when we’re supposed to believe that a moment of marital infidelity is utterly damning. We have no idea what his relationship with his wife is like. If the movie made an argument that Morris’ relationship with his family is a repudiation of an idea that Christianity is a necessary guarantor of values, his decision to sleep with an intern might be momentous. Joe Klein’s Primary Colors and the movie adaptation of the novel made the argument that the emotional profligacy that led fictional candidate Jack Stanton to sleep around was also critical to his success because it bound potential supporters to him for life. But we have absolutely no sense of what Morris is like as a human being, so it’s hard to know what his infidelity means. Is his aura of control a facade? Was it just a stupid mistake? Do we actually want to promulgate the idea that your personal life is a litmus test for your ability to do meaningful political work?
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I had some skepticism about The Ides of March and how it would handle the campaign staff, rather than the politicians, which is, of course, the key to making a movie that’s actually about Washington as opposed to a movie that thinks it’s about Washington. It looks like it’s got at least that focus right:

And that scene with the tie’s got a little snap to it, reminiscent as it is of the famous coffee scene in Brassed Off.

I suppose my concern is that it’s going to be a naive movie dressed up in handsome and skeptical clothes. Ryan Gosling’s character, it seems, starts out as a fixer, develops what Primary Colors would call a “galloping case of TB” (or true believerism), loses faith in his specific candidate, but continues to believe in a pure ideal. Primary Colors, on the other hand, has a character who starts out as a fixer, develops a similar case of TB, but essentially gets inoculated and accepts that a flawed vehicle for progress is better than none — while another character literally can’t survive the disappointment of her idealism. I don’t think politics is an inherently corrupt business, because there are clearly candidates who manage to make it into office without breaking campaign finance laws or accepting bribes. But I think that in our current state of affairs, it’s almost impossible to be politically effective by behaving in an entirely attractive fashion.

Does that mean that to create change you have to work for someone who solicits prostitutes, or is accused of sexual assault, or even if they don’t do anything illegal, is manifestly icky in his personal life? Of course not. But I do think our politics could probably benefit from an acknowledgement that there’s an unviable gap between how we want politicians to behave on the campaign trail and in office. The noble candidate who will bind up our wounds, love his wife and children, behave with perfect dignity on all occasions except those where he’s forced by circumstance to display a rapier wit, and usher in a new age of peace and prosperity, is an insufferable fiction.