“Give me a posthumous award”: The movie George Clooney wants vindication for
Not only is George Clooney handsome, sophisticated, and devilishly charming, but his body of work walks the line between blockbuster triumph and artistic purity, embodying Hollywood at its best.
He rakes in the dollars with the likes of the Ocean’s trilogy and then reinvests that into his own passion projects, some of which he commands from behind the camera. However, for all the success that has come his way in life, his track record isn’t spotless.
We could just dedicate this entry to Batman & Robin, Clooney’s ill-fated foray into the superhero genre. In a way, though, that movie has had a lasting legacy, one that the silver fox would like to forget, but it still exists. What’s more interesting are the films that have had no staying power whatsoever. Does anyone remember his remake of Solaris, or the Coen brothers romcom Intolerable Cruelty? And really, nobody would rewatch Syriana were it not the movie that landed its star an Academy Award.
Discussing his oeuvre, Clooney spoke about one of his overlooked releases in an interview with Esquire from 2008, when he revealed that he had a mantra that he always tried to stick to.
“I try to get a couple that hold up over the years,” he said, “O Brother [Where Art Thou?] holds up. Three Kings will hold up. Three Kings actually seems like it’s newsworthy…and The Peacemaker, of course. Someday, a group of people will discover that one and give me a posthumous award for that.”
Released in 1997, The Peacemaker is the first movie from pioneering filmmaker Mimi Leder and was also the first film to be distributed by DreamWorks Pictures, starring Clooney as a military intelligence officer tasked with tracking down a missing nuclear warhead against the backdrop of the Yugoslav wars. Despite being incredibly prescient upon its release, the movie failed to make a splash among critics, with even Clooney being critical of his own performance, citing it among the worst of his career.
However, as can happen in the movie world, history has been kind to The Peacemaker. It is viewed much more favourably now, with fans of the action genre viewing it as something of a hidden gem. It’s a fascinating insight into a period of time that feels incredibly foreign to anyone born after its release, but its themes of Russian military dominance are still scarily relevant.
We also shouldn’t ignore that it’s an action film directed by a woman, something that is still incredibly rare. Leder would go on to have a huge hit with Deep Impact a few years later, which is still one of the highest-grossing movies with a sole female director.
It’s been almost 20 years since Clooney passed judgment on The Peacemaker and almost 30 since it actually came out, so while nobody has given him a prize for it yet, he did say “posthumously”, and let’s hope it’s a long time before that part comes true.
