George Clooney was handed a lifetime achievement award Wednesday night and spent his acceptance speech defending the very thing the award honors: stories, and the people brave enough to keep telling them.
The Kentucky native, 65, accepted the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the opening ceremony of the 83rd Venice Film Festival and delivered the night’s defining lines. “We’re living through a moment in time where the people in charge and people with the most money are telling us to fear one another,” Clooney told the crowd. “But we know better than that, don’t we? Because history does teach us a lesson.“
Then the sharpest passage. “The first people that authoritarians try to shut down are not politicians,” he said. “They’re journalists who ask questions, they’re the artists who refuse simple answers, the filmmakers, writers, actors and musicians who insist that someone you never met is deserving of your empathy.“
Then the line the room will remember: “Stories are always dangerous to people who peddle in fear.” And its verdict: “The people who are afraid of books and music and stories are never the heroes in history.“
The speech’s heart was its case for common humanity. “Nobody cries in a different language. Parents worry the same. Kids dream the same,” Clooney said, arguing we are not as different as we are constantly told.
He closed on the image of a movie theater itself. “So yes, movies don’t stop wars, they don’t lower inflation, they don’t fix elections. But they do do something remarkable,” he said, because “if we can still sit together in the dark and care about people we’ve never met, I think we’ll be OK.“
At the same day’s press conference, Clooney went a shade further, reaching for a vocabulary word about home: “I think maybe we have a kakistocracy right now, but we’ll get through it. We will have an election in November that should be a check and balance.” He also backed Mark Ruffalo’s right to criticize the pending Paramount and Warner Bros. merger while doubting the deal’s financial logic.
The speech named no public figure; Clooney built it to work in any country and any century, which is precisely its bite. Venice has been his stage since 1998 and is where he married Amal in 2014.
The Stranger in the Dark
The replies came for him from every direction at once, which may be the most fitting reaction of all. “An actor said that,” one user deadpanned, while another reached back to his role in ending a president’s reelection bid: “Joe Biden looks pretty good now, eh George?” A cooler head split the difference: “Calling a government a kakistocracy is political rhetoric, not evidence.” And his corner answered too: “So thankful for the ‘steadiness’ of this voice of America in this moment.“
Lifetime achievement speeches usually look backward. Clooney used his to look around, and the room stood for it.
The heroes, he reminded them, were never the ones afraid of stories.
