George Clooney’s Directorial Career Has Devolved Into Boring Boomer Bait — And, Sadly, ‘The Boys In The Boat’ Is No Exception

For three of the past four Decembers, George Clooney has put out a new movie as a director, backed by a streaming service like Netflix or Amazon. It seems like a natural fit: Streaming, after all, is where non-shoestring adult dramas often wind up these days, and Clooney remains resistant to making the kind of big-ticket, four-quadrant tentpole junk that warrants an automatic theatrical release. Plus, he’s both old and old-fashioned enough to remember – it wasn’t too long ago! – how the last few weeks of December were a time for awards hopefuls opening in time to qualify for the Academy Awards. It was in this corridor that Clooney debuted his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, back in 2002. Why wouldn’t The Boys in the Boat, about an Depression-era underdog rowing team heading to the 1936 Olympics, follow suit?

But looking a little closer at the actual movie Clooney made in his first at-bat reveals something that seems worlds apart from his recent work. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind came out a time when Clooney was spending a lot of time toggling between working with the Coen Brothers and Steven Soderbergh, and while Confessions isn’t fully imitative of either, it definitely feels of a piece with that section of his filmography. It’s stylish and show-offy, with trick shots and a series of faded color palettes across its decade-hopping story, and though Clooney altered Charlie Kaufman’s script enough to annoy the prickly genius screenwriter, the story remains slippery in matters of reality and delusion. Needless to say, it did not wind up needing that Oscar-qualifying run; the awards politely passed. Good Night, and Good Luck did better, for obvious reasons: It’s a squarer, more restrained movie, about the respected news anchor Edward R. Murrow rather than the host of The Gong Show, with journalists taking a noble stand. It did not feel like the Coens, or Charlie Kaufman, or Steven Soderbergh. (Maybe a tiny bit Soderbergh. But keep in mind that Soderbergh was, at this time, in between Ocean’s 12 and Bubble.) Still, if it was Boomer bait, it was exacting and well-made. 

So how in the hell does the same guy make The Boys in the Boat? If Confessions and Good Night see Clooney learning the ropes of Soderbergh-via-Eastwood essays about 20th-century American culture, The Boys in the Boat is like Clooney performing those rituals during a deep slumber; it left me longing for the idiosyncrasies of even late-period Eastwood. There’s nothing wrong with a straightforward underdog-sports movie, but Boat is bafflingly, confoundingly free of narrative tension. A guy played by Callum Turner needs tuition money and attempts to join his west-coast school’s crew team, because it comes with a job and housing. It’s grueling work just to try out for the sport, which he’s never experienced before, and even harder to train. It looks like they might not win, because rowing crew is hard, but then they do win, because they’re good at rowing crew. That’s pretty much the entire movie. Oh, and a girl from the guy’s past re-enters his life, likes him immediately, and stays by his side through all the ups and… well, frankly, it’s mostly ups. The movie seems to think that simply beginning during the Depression is all the downs these characters need. 

What on earth drew Clooney to this material? The opportunity to work with Turner on disguising his British accent by using that corn-fed, flattened-out voice British actors tend to do when playing American? The chance to shoot the past in – get this – a somewhat faded and reserved color palette to signal that this story takes place in the past? A desire to “but also” Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics? This movie would be a disappointing, anticlimactic slog from the likes of Jon Turteltaub or John Lee Hancock; George Clooney has been nominated for Oscars for acting, writing, directing, and producing. Does he not remember how to do any of those things?

Though the experience of watching The Boys in the Boat is often stupefying, the film is a culmination of sorts. Though there have been some blips of interest when he’s made movies actually set in the 21st century (the political drama The Ides of March and the sci-fi emo potboiler The Midnight Sky), much of Clooney’s directorial career has remained adrift in the past, like a time traveler wandering around so long he forgets where he came from or how to get back. Leatherheads was the first time a Clooney-directed movie sounded great on paper – a screwball early-football rom-com with a touch of Intolerable Cruelty! – only to play surprisingly wan, a kind of cover-band screwball too polite to zing. The Monuments Men, a wartime caper starring Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, and Bill Murray, should have been a slam-dunk, and it was even worse: a sparkless bore. Suburbicon, a dark-underbelly-of-the-suburbs crime picture from a Coen Brothers screenplay that approached mid-century America with less reverence, didn’t work either. The Tender Bar, a lower-key period drama set in the 1970s and ’80s,  seemed like a chance for Clooney to loosen up, get a little personal and less historical; instead, it had no discernible personality beyond “annoying wannabe writer,” the kind of thing that washes up at Sundance. In this context, The Boys in the Boat feels like a last resort: Someone give me something set in the past that’ll be easy enough to push through. 

At the same time, I can almost understand where Clooney is coming from, though we depart on the matter of whether The Boys in the Boat is a watchable product of that sensibility. Even in his earlier years, Clooney always felt like a throwback movie star, someone who made the then-uncommon leap from television to the silver screen by sheer force of his vintage-strength charisma. The good old-fashioned dad movie has only come to look more precious and valuable in the quarter-century since his Out of Sight breakout, especially when venturing outside the realm of old-man action movies and into the kind of Elevated Dad stuff Clooney seems to favor. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that over the past ten years of seismic movie-industry change, he’s dug further into his traditionalism. Despite his work with streamers, he rarely chases trends, with one prestige-TV miniseries (the forgotten Catch-22), and zero superhero movies (unless you count a jokey cameo in one that bombed over the summer). At the same time, Clooney’s bona fide starring roles are fewer and further between, and movies like Money Monster and Ticket to Paradise (his last two wide theatrical releases!) both feel like they belong somewhere around 1997, right down to co-starring alongside Julia Roberts. They also fit right in with most of his later-period directorial efforts, in that they are not very good. Sometimes just being able to picture a movie in an earlier time period isn’t actually enough.

Maybe in this context, making a movie as stylistically adventurous as Confessions of a Dangerous Mind or even Good Night, and Good Luck would feel like an empty gesture – an older guy trying to keep up with the A24 and Neon movies that might serve as de facto competition for critical attention and awards. In a perverse way, a movie as square as The Boys in the Boat is a clearer declaration of purpose: To make movies so functionally similar to an older type of movie that there’s absolutely no reason to watch this 2023 version unless you’ve run out of all its ancestors. Even so, The Boys in the Boat feels especially like a dead end for a talented director and an even better movie star. Clooney has fallen asleep in his easy chair reading third-tier history books, and someone needs to shake him awake. 

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.