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George Clooney in Always at the Carlyle.Justin Bare

  • Always at the Carlyle
  • Directed by: Matthew Miele
  • Starring: George Clooney, Dwight Owsley, Anjelica Huston, Harrison Ford, Anthony Bourdain
  • Classification: PG/91 minutes

Rating:

1 out of 4 stars

In his fawning salute to a place where royalty and the 1 per cent stay, director Matthew Miele lets viewers in on a historic Manhattan hotel’s 100-year-old elevators that take the chic class to a suite where the view is as breathless as the $20,000 rack rate. And, yet, for Miele, the lifts only go one way, because Always at the Carlyle fails to get to the bottom of anything. It’s quite the rich-and-famous fandango, with actor George Clooney and others extolling the virtues of an elegant Old World place where the servants are loyal and discretion is paramount. Unfortunately, because filmmaker Miele also places value in discretion, his snazzy doc is celebrative – not investigative. When a woman is told the building was named after writer Thomas Carlyle, she replies, “How interesting.” Really? Is it? The late bread-breaking populist Anthony Bourdain tarnishes his reputation with nonsense about the hotel not being motivated by profit, and even an adorable stuttering concierge lets us down by waxing poetic about a simpler time – presumably when people knew their place. Too bad the gushing doc-maker Miele doesn’t know his.

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