George Clooney is
a leading man who
won’t be typecast.


By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

There’s no mystery about why George Clooney is a movie star. He’s the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

His performance in Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” has put him in early contention for this year’s best actor Oscar . He plays an Omaha business consultant named Ryan Bingham, who flies around America firing people for a living (but with a gentle touch) and occasionally delivers motivational speeches in which he advises his listeners to shed the burdens of responsibility.

What makes “Up in the Air” an ideal vehicle for Mr. Clooney is that everything he has to do in the film is just the smallest shade of difference away from his familiar amiable persona. Movie-star performing is a peculiar, poorly understood subset of the art of acting: it relies on a certain constancy of personality, on the ability to seem at all times as if you were simply playing yourself and to give the audience the illusion that they, somehow, know you - you the person, not just you the character.

Early in his film career, after the television series “ER” had made him a hot property, Mr. Clooney toyed with conventional character types: as a romantic comedian, a stolid man of action, and even, God help him, as a comic- book superhero, in the catastrophic “Batman & Robin” (1997).

When he finally found a role in which he looked entirely at ease, it was in Steven Soderbergh’s tricky comic caper movie “Out of Sight” (1998), based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and with all the noirish eccentricity that implies. His style in “Out of Sight” is too elusive, too stylized to serve as a repeatable, bankable star persona, but it’s the foundation, in a way, for everything good he’s done since then . The larcenous gulf war soldier he plays in David O. Russell’s inventive “Three Kings” (1999) is a tougher, slightly bitterer version of his “Out of Sight” character, and it fits.

He hasn’t typecast himself, really. It’s fairer to say that he has chosen his roles with an extremely canny awareness of his range, which doesn’t extend to the more outre regions of human behavior. He works the territory of 21stcentury American normality, playing - now, at 48 - middle-aged men beginning to feel stirrings of doubt and dread. Ryan Bingham is one of them, of course, but his slow-dawning suspicion that traveling light might not be all there is to life is a different order of dissatisfaction from the mortal panic felt by Bob Barnes, the C.I.A. field operative Mr. Clooney plays in Stephen Gaghan’s 2005 “Syriana.” He won a supporting actor Oscar for the performance.

Movie stars don’t have to work for the audience’s attention , which enables them to explore behavior in its minutest, most unpredictable particulars. That’s what George Clooney does in “Up in the Air,” while seeming only to be himself.

And it’s what he did in his first bestactor- nominated performance as the title character in Tony Gilroy’s dark corporate thriller “Michael Clayton” (2007). At the end of that movie Mr. Clooney flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his emptied-out eyes. It’s a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.


George Clooney in the noir caper “Out of Sight’’ (1998). / MERRICK MORTON/UNIVERSAL CITY STUDIOS