Free George Clooney by Mark Browning Page A

seating area some distance away but is immediately struck by her appearance, possibly by the vibrant red dress she is wearing. The emphasis is very much on his reaction to her, who as far as we can tell remains oblivious to him at this stage, as we zoom in to his rapt face, giving a slight tilt of the head, a bit like some kind of strange courtship dance between birds. We shift between high angles of him and low angles of her as he moves around a pillar to get a clearer view and his curiosity is sufficient to motivate a closer shot. Dodge goes up the stairs, past the man (Leonard) who is being humiliated by Lexie, and sits across from her, picking up a magazine, which he then tries to hide behind. Lexie and Dodge appear to indulge in that staple of screwball, flirtatious banter but with a twenty-first-century slant as Dodge states that he is in love with Leonard and feigns injury at how cruelly she cast him aside. This breaks Lexie’s reserve and she laughs despite herself, admitting “You’re a lot of fun”; but even though both are sitting forward and have shaken hands and exchanged formal introductions and friendly smiles, he pushes her sense of propriety too far in asking her out. She chides him—“Just because we had a laugh, doesn’t mean you know me”—but although apologizing, he repeats his assertion that he does know her true nature.
    However, there is little evidence that this is actually true. Her excuse (that she is waiting for her boyfriend) is actually not true; she is waiting for an interview with Carter. He takes her for a tease (“the kind of cocktail that comes on like sugar but gives you a kick in the head”) but actually the only one she teases is him. She does not appear to flirt withCarter to get her story; instead she takes her time befriending him but makes no promises of anything in return. A deleted scene, in which Dodge disagrees with Carter that C.C. will not be able to seduce a stranger on the train, shows that his confidence in his knowledge of women is misplaced as he loses the bet. Although screwball conventions dictate that insults should be read as displaced compliments, her comment that being “the slickest operator in Duluth is kinda like being the world’s tallest midget” has some edge to it.
    The farcical situation comedy of Lexie and Dodge winding up in the same cabin is the kind of more intimate experience in which, as in typical screwball, potential lovers are thrown together by circumstances and is an excuse for further high-speed banter, largely picking up the conversation from the foyer, possibly signaling a thawing of the frostiness between them. This is an explicit allusion to Frank Capra’s
It Happened One Night
(1934) where hero and heroine (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) are separated only by a blanket over a rope. The thin borderline here is represented by the curtains on their individual sleeping berths, producing a version of a split-screen effect as both Lexie and Dodge can be framed within the same shot. Dodge is the more powerful position here, having established his territory, and can look down on her discomfort with some pleasure. Her “You wanna play dirty?” is batted away with “Maybe later. I’m a little tired right now.”
    In general, some of the banter feels like slightly warmed-over Oscar Wilde (Leonard’s “I didn’t come over here to be insulted” is answered by Lexie’s “Where do you usually go?”), and Dodge’s admission “Well, you got me on that one” (in relation to being too old for Lexie) is delivered out of the side of Clooney’s mouth, almost like a Groucho Marx impression.
    The banter is picked up in the speakeasy, where Zellweger’s persona is reminiscent of Bridget Jones. Her tipsy dismissal of his date, dubbed “Miss Nipplewidth,” initiates some witty exchanges about the girl’s age and IQ (reckoned to