[COLUMN] Wolfs is a Movie Star Movie That Doesn't Understand Its Movie Stars | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains discussions of the plot of Wolfs, although Wolfs itself isn’t particularly interested in the plot of Wolfs. If you want to see it blind, please feel free to bookmark and come back. Wolfs is streaming on Apple TV+ now.

Watching Jon Watts’ Wolfs, a movie in which George Clooney and Brad Pitt play two competing fixers who find themselves tasked with covering up the same indiscretion, the audience is never meant to think about the lead characters as anything other than George Clooney and Brad Pitt. It is, in many ways, a meditation on movie stardom, albeit a very odd meditation on movie stardom.

Although the lead characters are named as Jack (Clooney) and Nick (Pitt) in supplementary material outside the film itself, the two lead characters are never named within the narrative. They are identified solely by the interest that they represent. Jack was hired by Margaret (Amy Ryan), a guest at the hotel where the incident occurred. Nick was hired by Pam (Frances McDormand), the owner of the hotel. In the subtitles, they are identified solely as “[Pam’s man]” or “[guest’s man].”

The audience is not meant to see Jack and Nick as actual characters. Instead, they are supposed to see George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Clooney and Pitt are frequent collaborators. They both headlined Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy, with Clooney playing Danny Ocean. They both appeared together in Burn After Reading, a Coen Brothers’ movie that co-starred Frances McDormand. The pair have also worked together on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and most recently on IF.

This is not so much subtext as actual text. Jack and Nick are factotums, men who can do all manner of work. However, they operate in a shady area. They are “fixers”, criminals, potentially even killers. Wolfs is playing off the audience’s relationship to both Clooney and Pitt’s screen personas, to the point that even early reactions to the first trailer pegged the pair as “two Michael Clayton/Winston Wolf types”, riffing on the beloved Clooney vehicle Michael Clayton.

Acknowledging that the film was specifically written for these two leading men, Watts himself concedes that Clooney and Pitt have “both played that guy. It’s like two Michael Claytons.” Wolfs has a very classical sensibility, to the point that its closing act features a brief appearance from Clooney’s old friend Richard Kind, who gets to deliver a monologue about the old-fashioned star power of Frank Sinatra, in a room filled with memorabilia of the Chairman of the Board.

Although Jack and Nick are essentially criminals, the film fixates on the pair as performers. Nick questions Jack’s ability to convincingly play intimidating.  “Now, there’s an art to this you may not realize,” Jack protests. When Jack demands to see his technique, Nick refuses. “You’ll steal it,” Nick complains. Jack boasts about how coolly he disposed of a body. “I showed you my luggage cart trick,” he argues. “You liked it. You’ll use it.” This is a scene about movie stars, discussing their signatures - less about the mechanics doing something than the art of looking cool at it.

Wolfs is ostensibly a neo-noir. The film’s convoluted plot finds Jack and Nick covering up a potential scandal that could derail the life and career of Margaret, the local district attorney whose near-one-night-stand with a much younger man (Austin Abrams) ends up tying into a vast conspiracy involving a shipment of drugs stolen from the Albanian mafia. However, while the plot twists and turns, the film doesn’t expect the audience to follow along. The plot is largely a justification for the film.

Instead, Wolfs plays as a film anxious about a rapidly gentrifying world. Set in New York, Jack and Nick navigated the diverse subcultures of the city. They journey to Chinatown, they crash a Croatian wedding, and try to evade the Albanian mob. However, this adventure is juxtaposed with shots of a city that is under heavy reconstruction, buildings being torn down and rebuilt behind a banner promising “great things to come.” It’s the looming threat of homogeny and gentrification.

Watts understands this. Watts has spent the past seven or so years working inside the modern franchise machine, directing the Spider-Man trilogy produced by Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios. More than most major modern franchises, that trilogy was a set of carefully negotiated alliances that threatened to collapse under only the slightest pressure. Watching Wolfs, one wonders if the portrait of two “fixers” caught between two competing masters is drawn from Watts’ experiences.

On paper, Wolfs is exactly the sort of project that has been squeezed out of cinemas by films like Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy. It should be mid-budget, adult-skewing fare. Michael Clayton makes sense as an inspiration, given that Sean Hooks famously described it as “Hollywood’s last movie for adults.” From another angle, Wolfs is a companion piece to Cop Car, Watts’ only film before Spider-Man: Homecoming. Both are stories of a stupid-but-innocent kid who wanders into a film noir plot.

Indeed, there’s an obvious nostalgia that permeates Wolfs. The movie seems to long for a return to the safety and comforts of the 1980s and 1990s. The soundtrack includes such late 20th century staples as “Mr. Vain” and “Smooth Operator.” Theodore Shapiro’s score directly evokes Ennio Morricone’s beloved theme from The Untouchables. One of the movie’s key plot points hinges on the use of a pager, a visual touchstone for the last decades of the 20th century.

There is a clear sense that Wolfs wants to be an example of the classic cliché of “the kind of movie they don’t make anymore.” It is designed to evoke an old-fashioned movie star movie, a neo-noir that is so convoluted in its plotting that the story matters much less than the leads. It is clearly set in the present day, but it feels like the artifact of a bygone age. It knows that the viewer cares a lot less about Jack and Nick than it does about Clooney and Pitt.

Wolfs even ends with a fairly overt homage to Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, giving the duo their own “Bolivian Army Ending.” The choice is both an allusion to another classic movie star movie and an expression of the film’s lingering worries about the long-term viability of this sort of movie. Wolfs feels less like a movie than it does a collection of abstracted anxieties about the state of the movies that have been thrown together in the loosest possible shape of a movie. Michael Clayton was about something more than how cool Michael Clayton was.

After all, there is something uncanny about Wolfs. It is a product of the very homogeneity and gentrification that it seems so deeply worried about. Michael Clayton was produced on a budget of $21.5m. Wolfs reportedly cost $200m, not so much “two Michael Claytons” as nine-and-a-half Michael Claytons, with Pitt and Clooney each earning more than $35m for their trouble. If nothing else, it is an expensive imitation.

One of the reasons that Wolfs costs so much is because it is a streaming movie, and so the production company has to buy out talent upfront. Pitt and Clooney aren’t working on an expectation that they will be fairly compensated based on how the movie performs – Apple is notoriously secretive with data about its streaming content – so the talent has to be paid out before the cameras start rolling as if the movie has been the biggest hit imaginable.

Wolfs was originally intended to have a somewhat traditional theatrical release, before Apple pivoted sharply in early August. It was decided instead that Wolfs would have an extremely limited one-week theatrical run in the United States and would just be dumped on streaming around the world. Interestingly, the gossip about this strategy shift is that it has little to do with cost or budget, but instead is a reflection of Apple’s attempts to manage the narrative around its films.

The implication seems to be that it is better for Apple to have a movie that simply does not exist, that disappears into the ether of its (quietly impressive but oft-overlooked) streaming service, than it is to have a movie that is publicly perceived as a failure. As a result, Wolfs feels like a movie that is designed to quickly slip out of the viewer’s consciousness. It isn’t a bug that Wolfs feels like a fading memory of a movie, it’s a reflection of how the movie is intended to be received.

There’s also the creeping sense that for all Wolfs is a movie about movie stardom, it doesn’t necessarily understand the concept. For all that the audience is meant to see Jack and Nick as Clooney and Pitt, it also seems like the film intends the audience to see them as generic and interchangeable. “How long have you two been working together?” the kid asks the pair at one point. “You’re basically the same guy.”

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how movie stardom works. Movie stars aren’t interchangeable. Each actor has a distinct energy, and part of the beauty of two-handers like Wolfs is in the frisson of watching two performers with similar or conflicting energies make sparks fly on screen. Despite being specifically tailored to its two leads, Wolfs doesn’t really seem to have a particularly insightful take on either Clooney or Pitt.

Wolfs makes the most sense as a Clooney project. It is, after all, riffing on Michael Clayton, a key Clooney text. However, the key to Clooney’s best work has always been an understanding that the character’s effortless cool is a mask that hides something more damaged and broken beneath it. Michael Clayton (Clooney) is very good at his job, but he also never fully delivered on his potential. This is Clooney’s energy; the kind of guy who might visibly bristle if he heard (perhaps incorrectly) that Quentin Tarantino said he wasn’t really a movie star, even if it’s a defensible argument.

Pitt has a slightly different energy. Pitt isn’t ideally suited to play generic or anonymous characters. He struggled to find his footing during his early career headlining milquetoast projects like Legends of the Fall, Seven Years in Tibet or Meet Joe Black. In contrast, Pitt really popped when allowed to play characters with rougher edges in films like se7en, 12 Monkeys or Fight Club. Even in something like Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, where his chill energy contrasts with Leonardo DiCaprio’s intensity, Pitt is still playing a man who probably murdered his wife – and possibly others.

Wolfs never really capitalizes on what makes Clooney and Pitt unique as leading men in a project like this, and so never demonstrates the potential of the star power around which it is built. To give the movie credit, it’s largely watchable and inoffensive. It relies on Pitt and Clooney’s charm, and the pair can easily deliver on those terms. However, Wolfs often feels like an idea of a movie more than a finished film. It’s a star vehicle with no clear sense of direction.