Ironic caper
Mark Steyn
Ocean’s Twelve 12A, selected cinemas The 1960 Ocean’s Eleven and the 2001 Ocean’s Eleven were oceans apart. The original Rat Pack shambles is a sobering example, for those whose idea of improvisation is a Ken Loach movie, of what happens when a movie’s really improvised lurching from scene to scene according to who’s shown up on set that day. There’s a great moment when Sinatra’s informed of Richard Conte’s death and, as he walks away, someone says, ‘He’s taking it bad.’ Not so’s you can tell. Frank saunters off like Juliet Prowse is waiting back in the suite with his Jack Daniel’s.
The George Clooney–Brad Pitt remake is the film the original Ocean’s was supposed to be, if only Frank and Dino and Sammy could have been bothered getting up before lunch and learning their lines. On the other hand, if they’d done that, it would have lost its authentically Rat Pack chaotic cool. The new Ocean’s Eleven floated on sheer charm, in particular the glossy sheen of Clooney. But it lost what the old Ocean’s had — the faint whiff of obnoxiousness of the golden-age Vegas set.
Ocean’s Twelve aims closer to the spirit of the original Eleven. It has no raison d’être other than to show us big-time celebs hanging out together — and, if a lot of the scenes aren’t improvised, they work hard at pretending they are. Unlike the 2001 Eleven, which Steven Soderbergh served up as a straightforward caper, Twelve just noodles aimlessly from one thing to another. In capermaking, a MacGuffin is a pretext, something to set the chase in motion, but even though it’s meaningless — the secret formula, the missing papers — you take it seriously. Twelve is an ironic caper: new MacGuffins come and go every 20 minutes, and there’s no pretence that they mean anything: Danny Ocean (Clooney) and his gang fly to Europe, and they break into a house in Amsterdam, and then they go to Italy, and then they try to steal a Fabergé egg, and then something else happens, and something else, and none of it matters. What would be the big suspenseful spine-tingly edge-of-your-seat scenes in a regular caper — secretly jacking a house off its foundation, replacing the Fabergé egg with a holographic image thereof — are ordered up like room service and sloughed off in seconds.
The film’s energy, such as it is, is in all the larky in-between bits — like a fauxinsecure Clooney pacing a railway platform and demanding to know from his comrades whether he looks 50. ‘Forty-eight,’ says one. ‘Fifty-three,’ says another. The defining scene comes when a bleary Clooney and Pitt are slumped on the couch of their hotel room in Rome at two in the morning watching a rerun of Happy Days — the Seventies sitcom, not Samuel Beckett dubbed into Italian. ‘The guy doing Potsie is unbelievable,’ marvels Clooney.
Does it work? Well, I saw it a couple of days ago and I can hardly remember a thing about it. But then I could hardly remember a thing about it even as I was watching it. I think I mentioned here once before that, in my limited experience of them, glamorous celebrity parties are far more boring than chicken pot pie night at the Legion Hall. I was once at a party in Sinatra’s pad at the Waldorf Towers, sitting on a sofa between Ali McGraw and Lauren Bacall, and it may be the most boring conversation in which I’ve ever participated. I take my share of the blame: I was boring, Ali was boring, Betty Bacall was mega-boring. The difference was that I was aware of the general torpor and frantically struggling to be interesting, whereas the gals gave the impression that being unboring was somehow uncool. A lot of the banter in Ocean’s Twelve seems to subscribe to the same theory. And, even in its studied inconsequentiality, the picture is as ruthlessly status-conscious as a Hollywood party: the A-listers (Clooney and Pitt) keep themselves to themselves, the oldtimers (Carl Reiner and Elliot Gould) are treated respectfully, and the rest of the gang don’t get much of a look-in. In the original Ocean’s Eleven, the big iconic image comes at the end — Danny (Sinatra) and his pals strolling past the famous Sands sign advertising that night’s show with their real names — ‘Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop, Peter Lawford’. Here, Julia Roberts does a laboured — and, indeed, virtually in-labour — variation on that gag. In 1960, Shirley MacLaine had an unbilled cameo. Here, Bruce Willis does. In his titles and freezes and music, Soderbergh imposes a high style on the movie. Lewis Milestone, Sinatra’s hired hand in 1960, didn’t have that luxury: on a one-take movie, any style has to be strictly organic.
Can you make a parodic soufflé rise? Clooney has an old-fashioned glamour the nearest thing we have to Cary Grant directed by Stanley Donen. Watching him mooching around Lake Como, I found myself pining for those Hollywood Continental capers of the Fifties and Sixties. Charade was a trifle, but at a certain level they meant it. In this movie, only Catherine Zeta-Jones, as a Europol detective, makes that mistake.
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