George Clooney (6 page)

The sense of a divided screen is present in the vertical wipes used as transition devices and the shot composition, like in the first taxi ride, where the symmetrical two-shot clearly juxtaposes the two in enforced proximity. Actual split-screens are used for phone scenes as the deadline pressure on both Jack and Melanie increases. As they separate after the drop-in center episode, the camera remains on a street scene and the pair walk out of shot, only to return four times, suggesting the difficulty they
now have in walking away from each other but also the need they both feel to have the final word.

The choice of basing the narrative around a single day is potentially interesting but simply put, not enough happens, literally or emotionally. This is very much an ordinary day for Melanie and Jack. She has an important presentation; he has a big story—but we get the impression that this is the nature of their professional lives. The film ultimately follows the agenda of the protagonists, i.e., work related rather than personal, and is the less interesting for it. Both are under some pressure (to win over an important client or to source a big corruption story) but the same might equally happen the following day or next week.

The film attempts to undermine cynicism, to emphasize that these two characters really do not know each other and judge their opposite gender harshly. Melanie does not necessarily hate all men, and Jack can find time in his life for children. The problem is that a lot of Melanie's distrust lacks any real basis in the film. We see Jack playing, and happy to do so, with his child, improvising a
Hunchback of Notre Dame
scenario in the scaffolding in his flat. As ex-partner Kristen leaves for her honeymoon near the opening, she gives Jack and Maggie a look of wistful envy, suggesting this is a glimpse of the husband and father that Jack could have been (with her). He is happy to live among boxes, toast marshmallows, and indulge in games of hide and seek. Later, he even retrieves his willful daughter as she hides under a table; without losing his temper and despite an urgent deadline, he patiently negotiates a deal with the child to have a cat.

Maybe he seems happy to accept the fun elements of fatherhood rather than the longer-term aspects of paternal responsibility (Kristen calls him a “good-time father”) but he seems far closer to the children in action as well as spirit than Melanie, who finds play difficult and spends her time scolding and giving lists of dos and don'ts. She is the one who loses her temper with Sammy in the design studio (for the boy playing), and although provoked, Jack does not. His version of play, involving an element of risk, seen in Sammy's accident with the marble, allowing the children to eat burgers for breakfast, and carrying Maggie on his shoulders, is portrayed as more healthy than Melanie's control freakishness. Like Sally in
When Harry Met Sally
(Rob Reiner, 1989), Melanie's fussiness is also expressed about food (this time for her child), but here we are not encouraged to laugh at this behavior as endearing, and her precise directions to the taxi driver just seem annoying. By her own admission she is “horrible” to Jack all day, while he responsibly looked after her son and she managed to lose his daughter.

If the sexual politics of romantic comedies such as
Sleepless in Seattle
(Nora Ephron, 1993) or
While You Were Sleeping
(Jon Turteltaub, 1995) overtly raise the question “Where have all the good men gone?”
One Fine Day
attempts to suggest that they are still here, just unrecognized and misjudged. However, the assumption that Jack puts his career before his children is refuted by Jack's action on screen. The film touches lightly on what it is to be a father, suggesting it is more connected to what you do rather than what you are: Melanie laughs at the drop-in puppet show until she sees it is created by Jack. However, if the film is seriously trying to exact a promise from Melanie as typical of hard-nosed women that “I can't do everything on my own,” it seems to be quite strained as if Jack is desperately needing a form of vindication, i.e., that men still have a role in society, even if no one is quite sure what that is.

At the climactic press conference, as we have learned so little of Jack's corruption story, it does not seem to matter to the viewer whether he succeeds in proving his point or not. The key witness he has been searching for suddenly appears in a taxi and virtually throws her story at him. The stakes are purely personal in his meeting Melanie at an agreed point in place and time. It is his demonstration of his credentials as a reliable father that matters here. In
Notting Hill
(Roger Michell, 1999), a climactic press conference actually features one of the two protagonists, Anna Scott (Julia Roberts), lending the event a sense of genuine emotional jeopardy, which seems lacking here. Melanie's outburst in defense of Jack, “at least he's honest,” seems more motivated to delay the press conference than to express a moment of realization of Jack's worth.

In the hectic nature of the narrative, particularly in the number of scenes that show the pair walking through crowded New York streets, it is tempting to see the film as actually dramatizing its very opposite: that here we have two adults for whom children are primarily an encumbrance to be dragged around and palmed off on any available child care. The guilt of using inadequate child care, particularly with reference to the drop-in center, eats away at Melanie. However, she is still someone who is in a position to buy a solution to most of her problems, from taxi rides to last-minute alterations to her broken building model. Ultimately, the film puts forward the fairly conservative notion, that bringing up children with two parents is better than one, but more for the prosaic factor of time sharing than any suggestion of a broader experience of gender and sexuality, and that a modern definition of parental paradise is a half-decent babysitter.

The film cemented Clooney's status as a romantic lead (his name, along with Pfeiffer's is enough to open this picture) but it also developed his on-screen persona, drawing on the child-friendly associations of Doug Ross
from
ER
. He is likeable and charming, while also a little childish and shy of long-term adult commitment (with a backstory of a failed relationship). Ironically, a central problem for Clooney in any romantic narrative is that he looks like George Clooney. The idea that someone who looks like him would have serious difficulty attracting female attention stretches audience credibility and sympathy. Even here, his face is known, plastered on adverts for his column on buses, and certainly Melanie's mother is very susceptible to his charm. The central premise of the film is implicit in the slogan accompanying his picture (“You don't know Jack”). Melanie is forced to accept this, while Jack already sees that she is not as strong and independent as she likes to appear. Most romantic comedies work on the basis of having misconceptions to undermine, but here he seems to read her quite accurately from the outset.

As an exposé of modern parenthood, it does not take us much beyond cliché, including the parental nightmare of losing a child (although here it is not Melanie's own). She is more distraught at the prospect of being exposed as an irresponsible parent in the eyes of Jack. The breakdown of the previous relationships of the protagonists seems vindicated: Sammy's father appears at the soccer game only in order to let the child down about spending time with him, and Kristen's initial appearance apparently dumping Maggie on Jack for the duration of her honeymoon does seem inconsiderate.

The puddle scene, signaled as a supposed emotional climax by the swelling score, is mawkish in the extreme, and Van Morrison's following “Have I Told You Lately” (1989) bleeds over shots of Jack sheltering Sammy from the rain, demonstrating his paternal protectiveness with Melanie lost in thought at a window of her apartment. The notion of dreaming of the object of your affection (represented by the music) and his or her sudden appearance on the doorstep all seems quite clichéd and designed more for narrative closure than emotional credibility.

Even in the final scene further obstacles are contrived, delaying further their eventual but chaste consummation. Their first kiss is interrupted by Jack's wisecracks about her dropping a bomb in his mouth like in
Jaws
; then the children need to be removed from the scene with the bribe of a video (Victor Fleming's 1939
The Wizard of Oz
with its central mantra, “There's no place like home”); then Melanie goes to freshen up; and lastly by the time she returns, Jack has fallen asleep. It feels more like a coy squeamishness in dealing with the sexual stage of the relationship, rather than the perpetuation of a romantic atmosphere. The action of the camera pulling back and out of the building, craning up past other apartments might suggest the same scenario is being played out in other homes, but
rather than the sense of typicality, there is also the feeling that this particular narrative has gone as far as it can credibly go. To introduce a sexual element here would take the plot in more serious and difficult territory (with certification, at least) and the film shies away from this.

As a romantic comedy, both elements are actually fairly scarce, the latter in particular. The funniest line in the whole film is probably Melanie's “If you don't want your balls juggled, don't throw them in my face,” but this feels more like an overwrought metaphor than knowing innuendo. The situation comedy of the pair improvising some superhero costumes has Jack's nice line, as he asks in awe “Where d'you get a bag like that?” but again this operates largely at the level of stereotype about the contents of women's handbags. Jack's use of deliberately provocative language on the phone in the taxi while sitting next to Melanie has some wit (he is speaking to his editor and yet asks “Are you wearing panties?”) as does his later warning to Sammy to “put the gun down,” but this does not really develop far beyond light banter. It seems more indicative of a light and easy charm that Jack regularly indulges in and, judging from the reaction of Melanie's mother, usually seems to work. The beauty parlor scene is interesting for its inclusion of a bullish receptionist who is openly oblivious to his superficial charms. When Jack asks for details of clients, she bluntly tells him that she has five sons and “when they make eyes at me like that, I make them a pot roast.” When presented with someone impervious to his charm, Jack is rendered fairly powerless (although with some luck, as the woman is called away, he gets to see the names on the register anyway). Melanie suspects he “can make women smile,” but this is more a cause of suspicion than engagement for her.

Like the scene in
The Full Monty
(Peter Cattaneo, 1997) in which a garden gnome is waved up at a window during an interview, Melanie struggles to concentrate during a meeting as Jack fools around outside with the children. Play is foolish and distracting but ultimately that is the point. The problem is that in the film, if he represents fun and she personifies responsibility, he is always going to be more dramatically engaging.

Clooney's second collaboration with the Coen brothers sees him move toward the screwball comedy, in particular the tension between marriage and capital, money and love. As Andrew Sarris defined the screwball comedy, here we have “a sex comedy without the sex.”
²
The cliché of a character discovering an adulterous coupling in a house would usually climax with a sex scene but we are denied this. Handheld camerawork takes us into the house but, sharing the point of view of Donovan Donaly (Geoffrey Rush), we only glimpse a fleeting figure, a rumpled bed, and an apparently innocent spouse with an implausible explanation. Manic visual gags predominate with Donaly firing his gun blindly at his departing wife speeding away in his car and then trying to take pictures of his wounded backside, having been symbolically stabbed with his trident-like Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement Award. The most we see between Miles (George Clooney) and Marilyn (Catherine Zeta-Jones) is a chaste kiss and plenty of flirting in the elevator, at dinner, and at legal meetings in front of lawyers. Deviant sex lives are described verbally in court, Rex's eccentric indiscretions are interrupted by Petch (the eccentrically named Cedric the Entertainer) bursting in with a camera (and later by a heart attack), and Miles's attempt at becoming tactile in the elevator is prevented by Marilyn's poodle biting his hand.

However, although there are surface features of the screwball, we have little of its emotional heart. There is certainly wit and banter (in place of the sex) effectively written with lots of memorable lines by the Coens. The first meeting with Marilyn features rapid, playful sparring, not between flirting couples but between their lawyers, Miles and Freddy (Richard Jenkins). Marilyn might look the part of a smart but undervalued individual, determined to prove her worth in a male world. However, the way that Marilyn plans to gain independence is not through her own intellect and ability but through her beauty and how it can ensnare men into marriage. She does not seem to crave respect for her own achievements, just the empty material benefits of a life lazing by a pool, typified by her friend, Sarah (Julia Duffy).

In terms of screwball types, there is a rich woman who attracts an emasculated hero, the latter part played particularly effectively by Clooney, accurately described by Freddy later as “a buffoon, too successful, bored, complacent and on [his] way down.” The fixation with his teeth provides a neat counterpoint to Clooney's previous part in a Coen brothers' movie, Everett in
O Brother
, with his obsession with Dapper Dan hair pomade. He is first seen here as a body part, via an ultraviolet close-up on his teeth—as he waits for Marilyn at dinner, he checks out his reflection in
the back of a spoon, his face ludicrously distorted. He declares “Maybe I'm reckless,” but that is the very last thing he is. In court, he struts up to Marilyn in the witness stand and gives her a lingering stare, before executing a ludicrously dramatic and calculated turn at her claim that she loved Rex (Edward Herrmann) at first sight.