The Toronto Star: It’s not easy being George

When Clooney breezes into the room with a self-deprecating joke about how he’s “the talent” for his new movie, The Good German (opening Dec. 15), one of the infatuated femmes wants to know how he’s been celebrating regaining his Sexiest Man title.

“I’m throwing a big party … I’m inviting Danny DeVito!” he quips, referring to last week’s pseudo-scandal about DeVito showing up sauced for TV’s The View after being out with Clooney.

The other woman flanking Clooney begins by praising his Darfur work and then bizarrely segues into a question about how Clooney treats the women he dates and whether he’s “ethical” in his intentions with them, seeing as how he’s a confirmed bachelor.

“How do you get from that to that?” Clooney exclaims, looking genuinely surprised and amused.

“That is a good one! I like it. Okay, so now you’ve gone from the idea that I want to bring up Darfur, to do I piss off some girl that I went out with?

“Yes, I am ethical in my relationships!”

The woman presses further. Do his dates feel that Clooney is ethical with them?

“I don’t know,” he answers, starting to lose patience. “You’ll have to ask them.”

Could she do that? Who has he been dating? “I’m not going to tell you,” comes the reply.

(Does his Good German co-star Cate Blanchett count? She’s never been romantically involved with Clooney, but she professes him to be “a gentleman.”)

It’s safe to say that sex is probably not front-and-centre on Clooney’s mind on this unseasonably mild New York day. He’s wearing a back brace, hidden beneath a motorcycle T-shirt layered over a jersey. He still suffers from the spinal injury incurred while making the oil industry exposé Syriana. The CIA agent role earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar this year.

“I’m wearing a brace now, but it’s okay, it’s doing better.”

His female admirers can be forgiven for perhaps taking Clooney less seriously than he professes to want to be taken.

His essential boyishness is never far from the surface, even though his salt-and-pepper hair makes him look older than his 45 years.

The Good German, directed by Clooney’s production partner and frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh, is about as serious as movies get.

It’s a story about corruption and collusion by American and Russian forces in a morally unhinged Berlin at the close of World War II. Clooney plays a newshound whose investigation of a murder turns up unsavoury truths.

Co-starring Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, the movie is a deliberate throwback to the dramas of the 1940s, in particular Casablanca and The Third Man. It is filmed in black and white with vintage equipment.

Clooney keeps talking about how much fun it was to make. But does “fun” apply to a film as dark and twisted as The Good German?

“It is actually a fun project,” he insists. “It’s fun to work on these things. We don’t do them thinking they’re going to be giant box-office hits. We do them because we think we might be able to spend this time we have pushing to get films we think are interesting made. We want to aim a little higher than the low bar.”

Does he see it as a message movie of any kind? Parallels can be drawn between the Allied occupation of postwar Berlin and the current American occupation of Iraq.

“We didn’t make it as a message movie,” Clooney says. “I remember when we were shooting it, the thought was it depends on where we are politically at the time, whether it’ll be a film about how to screw up an occupation or not!

“We didn’t really think of that, it’s not really about that,” he added. “The interesting thing would be about how we were pardoning war criminals (after World War II). And I don’t think we did much of that in this last one (Iraq). So I think they’re not very similar to having much of a political statement.”

So much for current resonance. It’s possible Clooney is shying away from overt political statements because he doesn’t want to be seen as a Hollywood activist, an image that is frequently a career killer. He insists that his missions to talk to African political leaders about the Darfur crisis, with more to come in the weeks ahead, are intended strictly to help put the spotlight on Sudan, a country where ongoing conflicts have led to mass slaughter that the U.S. government calls genocide.

“You don’t make policies,” Clooney says of his goodwill missions. “I think that’s a mistake that happens sometimes when you’re famous and people are willing to hear you. You start thinking that what you’re saying can change things. And what you realize is that your job isn’t to change things, it’s not to create policy, but to shine a light on good or bad policy and try to help the policymakers make changes. I think that that’s the secret.”

But back to fun. He had loads of it making Ocean’s Thirteen, the second sequel — and probably the last — to his smash 2001 remake with his partner Soderbergh of Ocean’s Eleven, the Rat Pack caper flick that originally starred Frank Sinatra as funky felon Danny Ocean. It’s due out next year.

Clooney finally admits what many critics were saying when Ocean’s Twelve came out in 2004 — it wasn’t up to snuff. “We felt like it was two-thirds of a good film and it sort of fell short in a couple of places. We wanted another crack at it and we came up with a really good idea, which is revenge. Which is always good. It’s not about making money. We thought this could be a really fun, fun film to make.”

Clooney also plans to put his director’s cap back on, following the success of last year’s Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. His third feature will be called Leatherheads, and it’s a movie about football set in 1925. Clooney will direct himself; Renée Zellweger co-stars. Look for it in 2008.

Guess what he thinks the movie will be? “It’s gonna be fun. I’m really excited about that.”

What isn’t fun is talk about his age, which he’s starting to feel. One of his gushing female flankers makes the mistake of mentioning it.

“I’m not 45, I’m 23!” he howls in mock protest. “Are you crazy?”