George Clooney, Wife Amal Charm At Venice: ‘Suburbicon’ Review, Plus Clooney’s Amazing Confession

George Clooney’s wife Amal Clooney charmed the paparazzi and other cinephiles at the premiere of Clooney’s new directorial venture, Suburbicon, at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.

Amal, who gave birth to the couple’s twins Elle and Alexander back in June, appeared stunning in a lilac frock with enough of a neckline to give the swaying crowds at Venice’s red carpet a flaunting look of her post-pregnancy physique. Husband George himself could not be more enamored at his wife’s glowing presence, and the two seemed to cozy up a lot to each other before the screening, perhaps signaling that their relationship stays strong as ever, not something you could say about other couples in Hollywood (ahem!).

This was the couple’s first red carpet walk after the birth of twins, and George Clooney appeared all the more excited having directed a venture that he considers is an appropriate response to the quiet anger simmering within the hearts of Americans because of the course of events over the last year or so.

“The genesis of the screenplay [came when] I was watching a lot of [Trump] speeches on the campaign trail about building fences and scapegoating minorities, and I started looking around at other times in our history when we’ve unfortunately fallen back into these things, and I found this story that happened in Levittown, Pennsylvania.”

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However, he added that the original script of the film was realized by long-time collaborators, the Coen Brothers, back in the 1980s, and as a result is not something that is directly focused on Donald Trump’s ascension to power. But while it may be that the film does not deal with the impact that last year’s elections had on the American psyche, it speaks of the underlying racial tensions, something both George Clooney and wife Amal believe have been simmering in Americans for a long time, but perhaps are at their starkest now.

“A lot of us are angry – angry at ourselves, angry at the way that the country is going, angry at the way the world is going. It’s probably the angriest I have ever seen the country, and I lived through the Watergate period of time. There is a dark cloud hanging over our country right now.”

But if this anger is something that George Clooney was hoping to achieve with Suburbicon, it seems to have been misguided. While Suburbicon was one of the most anticipated entries at Venice, it seems to have disappointed in its attempts at texturing a Coen Brothers’ script with Clooney’s aim of holding white privilege in America up to scrutiny. What comes out, as The Guardian pointed out, is a film which appears too pleased with itself, to the degree where it becomes the “idiot child” of the Coen Brother’s cult classic, Fargo.

“At some point, in other words, we realise that what we are seeing is the idiot child who would one day grow up to be Fargo. It’s been locked down in the basement for the past 30 years. Clooney, damn his hide, just opened the door and threw on the overhead light.

“There’s no danger of this one keeping the president up at night.”

But, if nothing else, the film’s script and the developments over the last year seem to have given George Clooney a new perspective. He even joked it would be fun to be the next president of the United States.

“Would I like to be the next president? Oh, that sounds like fun,” Clooney said at the press conference, according to The Statesman.

George Clooney could be sure to need his lawyer wife Amal even more then.

[Featured Image by Joel Ryan/AP Images]