The age of movie stars has been overrated. If audiences are now drawn to movies not for the stars but for the franchise concepts, I’m not sure how Timothée Chalamet’s career fits into that; Emma Stone and Zendaya would like to be in one word. Still, when you watch George Clooney and Brad Pitt in “The Wolves,” a smart, light, charming, and sweet action comedy about two rival fixers who must learn to work together, you’d be forgiven for describing the feeling you get as movie star nostalgia.
These two stars have been stars since the ’90s, and no one, not even themselves, pretends to be young. Yet no one makes aging more appealing than they do. Clooney is the rare actor who has always worn his gray hair like the epitome of glamour (when you take a picture of him in the old days, dark hair looks just wrong), and now, at 63, he has a silver beard and hair that’s not just two colors but two different colors. marbleIt had achieved a kind of mystique that characterizes fine wine. And for Pete, who was not a young man in his sixties, it was a kind of He is His age does not change.
But as “Wolves” demonstrates, these two’s cool looks wouldn’t make any sense if they weren’t accompanied by their swagger. It’s as if they made this movie to remind us all how to do just that.
Wolves opens in a luxury New York hotel suite, where prosecutor Margaret (Amy Ryan) is in a state of panic. There’s a young man, apparently dead, lying next to the bed in his underwear, with broken glass all around him. What happened? She picked him up from the hotel bar, they came to the room, and he was bouncing up and down on the bed when he accidentally fell and crashed through a glass table. File this under “bad things happen.” To avoid a major mess, Margaret dials a number she has in her contacts but never used. It’s a middleman, played by Clooney, who immediately starts telling her what to do on the phone, exuding the dry authority of… Michael Clayton.
Soon after, Clooney shows up at the suite, wearing his blue surgical gloves, and tells Margaret to sit down, have a stiff drink, and not to worry, because he'll take care of everything. He'll make it all go away. Everything goes according to plan until a few minutes later, when there's a knock on the door, and he enters from nowhere, wearing the same blue gloves. He's also a fixer-upper. Who's calling him? The hotel owner, Pam (we only hear her voice on the phone), who's watched the whole thing through a hidden security camera and wants to clean up the mess as much as Margaret does. She doesn't want her hotel to be poisoned by scandal.
Neither man is ever named. Clooney’s character, referred to in the credits as “Margaret’s Man,” is a man of Swiss watch precision and time-tested methods, all driven by the conviction that no one else can do what he does. But the arrival of Pitt, known only as “Pam’s Man,” throws a monkey wrench into this. Clooney views Pitt as a pretender, a mere amateur at the game of manipulation, but in reality, they are both experts at… well, manipulation.
The spark of “Wolves,” written and directed by Jon Watts (who directed all three of Tom Holland’s “Spider-Man” films), is the constant stream of animosity and rivalry between Clooney and Pitt, like something out of a slapstick comedy. It’s not just that the two characters don’t like each other. Each is invested in his own superiority—his own special brilliance. So their rivalry isn’t just about insults and taunts. It’s a deadly competition to see who can be the coolest.
There’s been this kind of chemistry between Clooney and Pitt before, in “Ocean’s Eleven,” where the unspoken joke was that despite being rivals for Julia Roberts’ affections, they were trying to outdo each other, but in the heat of the competition, they found their connection. In “Wolves,” Clooney and Pitt are having a blast, while at the same time, having a good time. i don't really love you The crass banter, which makes even the most casual insults go viral. As the film progresses, these two will learn to work together, but the film's anti-grammar title says that each of them is a lone wolf. They have no desire to get along like each other. WolvesThe joke of course is that from their stylish leather jackets to their secret big man to their reading glasses, they're pretty much the same guy.
Clooney’s character knows a trick or two about how to lift a body into a hotel car, and for a while, as the two ride the elevator to the parking garage, where they place the body in Clooney’s trunk, the movie is all tricks and tricks, an improvised “Ocean’s Duo.” But the movie turns into a different kind of movie (I feel the need to issue a spoiler alert, even though this happens fairly early on) after the body refuses to stay still.
“Wolves” turns into one of those movies about new buddies, with Austin Abrams, of “Euphoria” and “The Walking Dead,” playing the aforementioned man in his underwear, known only as “The Kid.” He turns out to be a chatty alien, like Timothée Chalamet, imbued with the spirit of a young Sam Rockwell. (At one point, he has to wear a dress as a shirt, which is very typical of Chalamet.) The main complication is that the Kid was carrying four packages of heroin in his backpack, worth $250,000. How did he get it? He was doing a favor for a friend, but the bottom line is that the middlemen need to figure out where those packages of drugs came from and return them.
At some point, you realize that this mission isn’t really about “fixing” (perhaps it was a plot twist for a sequel to the 1980s film “Stakeout”), and the film slips into more crime-thriller mode. But the mood remains lighthearted, thanks to the way Clooney and Pitt, even when they’re collaborating, never miss an opportunity to poke fun at each other. Oddities are revealed, like Clooney’s penchant for getting to the bottom of what’s going on by throwing out elaborate conspiracy theories. A nightclub party scene, where they have to pretend not to know each other to avoid angering an Albanian drug lord, proves to be the highlight of their impromptu partnership. A restaurant scene at the end has a deliciously wry fatalism.
After “Wolves” premiered at the Venice Film Festival, a friend asked me if I would be inclined to pick a movie like this, which is likely to be streamed on Apple much more than it will be shown in theaters, and rate it on a streaming-only curve. The answer is no, though it’s a good question, and you can certainly rate it both ways. Next to the vast majority of streaming-only material, “Wolves” feels like the quintessence of elegant, smart, stylish entertainment. It feels completely old-fashioned (in a good way). But as a streaming-only movie, it feels like a classic. filmThe Friends movie that will be released in theaters is, in the end, a well-made film, nothing more, nothing less. Buddy movies are always, on some level, platonic love stories, but in this case, by the time Clooney and Pitt figure out their relationship, they’ve come close to erasing the movie’s premise: that the key to being a meddlesome person is that they can’t afford to have a heart. These two never lose their cool, but by the end you almost feel like they’ve put on sheep’s clothing.
