Send in the clones: George Clooney and Renée Zellweger in Leatherheads. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon
George Clooney's latest directorial effort, the lightweight American football film Leatherheads, has died a quick death here in the US, and, frankly, that's come as a bit of a shock. Clooney obviously isn't aiming for the gravitas of Good Night and Good Luck this time around, but he misses his new mark by a mile. And I blame Preston Sturges.
Although Leatherheads is a stab at traditional screwball comedy, Clooney tries to wring laughs out of snazzy, Sturges-style repartee that, in re-hashed form, stands as nothing more than good-hearted anachronism.
Why does this happen? Why do talented directors abandon their personal instincts, then try to ape icons whose mise en scene may as well be patented trademarks? Are they such fanboys that they can't tell they're virtually doomed to fail?
Fellini takes a real hit with this stuff. Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is saved by plain old gutsiness and a dynamic lead performance from Roy Scheider. But it's still basically Fellini's 8 1/2 in tap shoes. Stardust Memories, on the other hand, is easily the least likeable picture from Woody Allen's golden period, a pretentious 8 1/2 homage that's only sporadically effective. And Paul Mazursky's badly-dated Alex in Wonderland is even worse.
Nevertheless, Fellini's corpus lies relatively unscathed compared to Hitchcock's. As far as I'm concerned, there's not a more damning phrase in a film critic's arsenal than 'Hitchcockian'. But directors who should absolutely know better can't get enough of those icy blondes and shrieking violins.
Did you know Jonathan Demme once made a middling Hitchcock homage called Last Embrace, starring none other than Roy Scheider? Probably not. It seems unlikely that even Demme remembers it. Then there's Robert Benton's Still of the Night, which stars Meryl Streep as an icy blonde who may or may not be trying to kill a psychiatrist played by ... Roy Scheider! Apparently, Scheider always wanted to work with the masters, but they all died before he got a chance.
Then there's Brian De Palma, whose career contains so many nods to Hitchcock it develops a twitch. De Palma oozes cinematic style. But it's not his cinematic style, and no amount of postmodern back-flipping will ever make it his. Of course, he's largely left Hitchcock alone at this point. Redacted notwithstanding, he's been at it so long, he mainly rips himself off. But at least he's still alive to tell himself to cut it out, so there's hope.
