It’s Sunday night, maybe Sunday afternoon, and the realization that impending work week and Monday morning are drawing nigh. This feeling of dread or melancholy is colloquially referred to as the Smondays. But fear not, for I have the perfect antidote with which to put your troubled mind at ease and lay your worries down: the Sunday Night Movie. A curated selection of movies hand selected by me personally with the sole intention of providing you with some pure, unadulterated escapism, a viewing experience you can lose yourself in and clear your mind for a peaceful Sunday night sleep. You can rest assured, this weeks selection is a first round draft pick in the Sunday Night Movie category: Ocean’s Eleven.
Steven Soderbergh’s 2001 film Ocean’s Eleven, starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt and an all star supporting cast, is effortlessly cool and endlessly fun, all while being highly self aware and self effacing. Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven is a remake of the 1960 movie starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, and Peter Lawford, and succeeds where that movie failed. Soderbergh is able to trade on and capitalize upon the currency of the star power and inherent coolness of his leading actors in a way that is unassailable and undeniable. That’s not to say Sinatra, Martin, Davis Jr and Lawford aren’t or weren’t cool, they were. It’s just that the original film never figured out how to translate their style of cool onto the big screen. Soderbergh brings a sense of style, tone and playfulness to the proceedings that really elevates the experience and makes every moment enjoyable. Perhaps the director’s greatest strength is getting out of the way of Clooney and Pitt and allowing them to just be.
George Clooney as Danny Ocean and Brad Pitt as Rusty Ryan are the not so secret sauce of Ocean’s Eleven. In fact, they are the key ingredient. They bring an ineffable coolness to the movie with their magnetic charm and their seismic star power. What might be lost on most people is just how difficult it is to pull off being cool without tipping too far the other way. There are bad versions of these performances where to of the handsomest men to grace the big screen try too hard to be cool and take themselves too seriously, at which point, the entire movie comes apart at the scenes. Instead Clooney and Pitt’s magnanimous and self effacing good natures shine through with their movie star brilliance. They are in on the joke, winking with a sense of humour about themselves. Some of the best moments in Ocean’s Eleven are just hanging out with these two, even if they aren’t doing much of anything and just sitting there in hotel rooms or cocktail lounges. They are so magnetic that almost everyone is either attracted to them or just wants to hang out with them or some variation of both, which is a very rare quality in movie stars. The movie doesn’t overplay it’s hand either, it leaves you wanting more of Pitt and Clooney and rounds out it’s A list supporting cast with the likes of Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Elliot Gould, Casey Affleck, Scott Caan, Carl Reiner and Andy Garcia, all of whom bring their A game and make the most of whatever screentime they are given.
There’s one other ingredient to Ocean’s Eleven that elevates the movie to unworldly levels of cool, Las Vegas. Soderbergh’s Las Vegas is a mythical, sophisticated, rarefied air version of Las Vegas that doesn’t really exist, but is the perfect setting for Clooney and Pitt and company to just hang out and plan their complicated heist. We may never get to physically go to that fictional version of Vegas, but you can definitely go and hang out with Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan there for two hours, it’s the perfect escapist destination on a Sunday night and you don’t even need a ticket.