From their dual breakouts in the 90s to a middle-of-the-road reunion in Ticket to Paradise, Roberts and Clooney outshine everything but each other. Eliza Janssen hones in on the subversive rom-coms in their careers and their latest holiday flick.
Already a remake of a self-consciously starry Rat Pack vehicle, Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven series ate itself in the 2004 sequel Ocean’s Twelve. Amongst a blindly famous ensemble cast of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Catherine-Zeta Jones and Andy García, it was Julia Roberts who was chosen to break the glamour of the film’s diegesis.
She plays Tess, the wife of George Clooney’s lead, playing Julia Roberts, in a goofy and somewhat miscalculated scene made all the more distracting by a coincidental Bruce Willis appearance too. Having a five-time People’s Most Beautiful Woman Alive winner acknowledge their unreal reality does tend to throw off tightly-plotted heist flick.
Clooney, meanwhile, only has one People’s Sexiest Man Alive title, way back in 1997. And yet his megastar celebrity is never that separable from the roles he’s taken on since. Constantly compared to the Hollywood charisma of stars like Cary Grant and Clark Gable, he’s played on those old-timey charms in his retro roles for the Coen Brothers, and his own historical films Good Night and Good Luck, Leatherheads and The Monuments Men.
Perhaps trying to dodge his ladykiller label, though, Clooney never really appears in straight-up romances. When he does, it’s for sympathy as a widower in his Oscar-nominated The Descendants role, or when backed up by acerbic screwball screenplays like Intolerable Cruelty and the sizzling Out of Sight (Soderbergh again).
Roberts, too, seems to have grown sick of the romcom genre since 1999, when she appeared in both Notting Hill and Runaway Bride as protagonists whose love lives are seemingly the concern of the entire planet. Save for the lame Eat Pray Love, Soderbergh can again be blamed for sending Roberts off on decades of fiercer, more independent female roles: after winning a Best Actress Oscar for Erin Brockovich, she’s played heaps of spies, CIA agents, and mums with little time for love.
Pretty Woman made Roberts a household name and sex symbol, but My Best Friend’s Wedding’s anti-hero Julianne is her greatest subversive rom-com character. She’s nearly unlikeable, conniving to ruin the nuptials of the bestie she’s always hoped to end up with. Her comeuppance in the film’s final act is cathartic, sad and wise, bringing a rare sense of realism to the genre of fluffy wedding cinema.
Man, I wish there was some of that cleverness in Clooney and Roberts’ new lowest-common-denominator reunion. The pair mostly phone it in throughout Ticket to Paradise, their expressiveness conveniently obscured by sunglasses, as the bitterly divorced parents of Kaitlyn Dever’s non-character. She’s spontaneously engaged to a hot Balinese guy whilst on holiday with scene-stealing bestie Billie Lourd, and her folks are determined to stop the impending wedding.
In a very mild script that could’ve been given to any pairing of rom-com dependables (Ryan and Hanks too old, Hudson and McConaughey too young?),it mostly feels like an excuse for both stars to bring their families on a paid holiday to Queensland. Yep, Ticket to Paradise was shot in Australia, adding some extra insult to the smiling natives and tourism-brochure nuances of its Bali setting (“How is this even a thing?”, Clooney grumbles at one of his new son-in-law’s indigenous rituals).
We only have fun when Clooney and Roberts are having fun—when allowed to really emote and react to one another, her smile still impossibly wide and his laugh lines only deepening in a drunken dance sequence. If the film had merely begun with the family reuniting on the island, rather than the repetitive intro of the pair verbally expounding how much they hate each other, and included a pandering blooper reel in the credits, Ticket to Paradise could’ve just let us bask in how charming (and duh, attractive) its two-hander stars are.
Maybe that’s the problem here. After decades of IRL friendship and four collaborations on film (Clooney cast Roberts in two other projects he’s either directed or produced, Money Monster and the well-done Soderbergh rip-off Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), Clooney and Roberts are just too big to be reigned in by a limp modern-day take on the 1940s comedy of remarriage genre. Especially if the Coens or Soderbergh aren’t involved (“I’d agree but then we’d both be wrong”, goes one of Roberts’ bumper-sticker-esque barbs).
Across two breathlessly popular careers of bucking rom-com tradition and bolstering each other’s celeb credentials, Ticket to Paradise can feel like a middle-of-the-road missed opportunity. It would’ve been great to see Clooney and Roberts in a screwball romance befitting of their blinding star power, but we can at least hope they had a ball making it: their travel videos might’ve been more infectiously fun to watch.
