George Clooney: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 Awesome Performances

5. Matt - Gravity (2014)

All talk might have been of Sandra Bullock's intense, captivating performance as the loneliest astronaut, but as director Alfonso Cuaron is careful to acknowledge, Gravity would have been an entirely different film without George Clooney. The film is consciously and wonderfully absent of concept: it's not so much a sci-fi as it is a tense human drama that is almost incidentally set in space. It busies itself more in capturing feelings and assaulting the senses - literally trying to make the audience feel the same as Bullock - and that experience is to its eternal credit. But even with a seemingly meagre agenda, Gravity would have been far more difficult to take and far less accessible - even with Bullock in the lead - if it wasn't for Clooney's Matt. He is the balance to the piece, the personification of hope who takes a completely lost character and bludgeons her through tender methods into wanting to get home: a singular apathy transformed into a singular compulsion, riding on the back of Clooney's familiar, beautifully measured voice. He is the yin to her yang, the counterpoint that is far more than one dimensional or purely functional, and the performance is almost as noteworthy as Bullock's.