George Clooney in 2020?
While at the Venice Film Festival, the politically outspoken director of “Suburbicon” was asked if he would run for President of the United States someday, an idea that isn’t that big of a stretch of imagination if you follow his work as an activist.
“Would I like to be the next president? Oh, that sounds like fun,” he responded, according to the Daily Beast.
One of his film’s stars, Matt Damon, had a condition to add. “Can I just say that I’d like anybody to be the next president of the United States. Right away, please.”
The politics questions were in line with discussions about the origins of the “Suburbicon” screenplay, which Clooney said came from watching Trump speeches on the campaign trail.
“I started looking around at other times in our history when we’ve unfortunately fallen back into these things, and I found this story that happened in Levittown, Pennsylvania,” Clooney explained.
The story in question involves William and Daisy Myers, an African-American family that moved to Levittown in the 1950s. At the time, the suburb was populated mostly by white people, many who did not respond kindly to the couple moving in. This kicked off a months-long stretch of racial violence that included harassment, threats and riots.
“Suburbicon,” meanwhile, follows two couples — the Myers (Leith M. Burke and Karimah Westbrook) and their white neighbors, played by Damon and Julianne Moore.
“When you talk about ‘Making America Great Again,’ America being great everyone assumed was the Eisenhower ’50s, and it was great if you were a white, straight male, but other than that it probably wasn’t so great,” Clooney continued. “It’s fun to lift up that curtain and look underneath that thin veneer and see some of the real problems that this country has yet to completely come to terms with.”
“Suburbicon,” written by Joel and Ethan Coen, Clooney and Grant Heslov, is certainly timely. TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde, however, said that the film is a “garish and overblown crime melodrama that combines clumsy noir with lame jabs at 1950s suburban conformity and racism.”
“Is racism in the United States as toxic as ever? Absolutely,” Duralde wrote. “Is pointing out the existence of racism in the gleaming Eisenhower era the stuff of dramatic counterpoint or groundbreaking observation? Nope.”