Two Lions, One Legacy

Today marks the final day of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and while the closing ceremony will hand out this year's Golden Lion for Best Film, the festival has already delivered two of its most memorable moments. Over the past ten days, Venice awarded its Lifetime Achievement Golden Lions to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn — two American actors, four decades apart in age, whose careers together span nearly a century of American filmmaking.

Bookends of a Festival

Clooney received his Lion at the festival's opening ceremony on September 2, presented by longtime friend Laura Dern, whose own history with him dates back more than 40 years to a horror sequel they filmed together in Hungary. Visibly emotional, Clooney reflected on a 45-year career that has carried him from early B-movies through ER, six Oscar nominations, and a parallel career as a director behind films like Good Night, and Good Luck. His relationship with Venice runs deep: he first appeared there in 1998 with Out of Sight and has returned repeatedly since, most recently premiering Jay Kelly at last year's edition.

Burstyn's Lion arrived five days later, on September 7, under far stranger and more poignant circumstances. At 93, she received the honor alongside the world premiere of Flesh Impact, a 17-minute short film directed by this year's jury president, Maggie Gyllenhaal, built around an idea Gyllenhaal pitched to her in person: what if Burstyn played an imagined, 100-year-old Marilyn Monroe? Dakota Johnson co-stars as Monroe at the height of her fame; Burstyn plays the woman Monroe, who died at 36, never lived to become. "It sounded like a good idea to me," Burstyn told reporters of the pitch. Her actual career, spanning more than 150 films across six decades, includes an Oscar for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a defining turn in The Exorcist, and later work in Requiem for a Dream and Interstellar — a filmography Venice's artistic director Alberto Barbera called a model of "emotional truth" sustained across half a century.

Venice's Lifetime Achievement Lion has always functioned as a kind of bracket around the festival itself — a way of honoring the durability of a career against the churn of any single year's competition. This year's pairing, by accident or design, told an unusually complete story: one honoree still very much mid-career, receiving the honor as a kind of milestone marker; the other, in her tenth decade, still finding entirely new characters to play. As Venice's main competition wraps up tonight and hands out its Golden Lion for Best Film, it does so having already made its point twice over — that a life in film, however it's lived, tends to earn its own kind of ending worth applauding.