Michael Clayton

As with Into the Wild, I think I enjoyed Michael Clayton more than it deserved. (Spoilers below the fold.)

Tony Gilroy’s movie is an imitation-‘70s thriller that misses what makes the best of the paranoid-style movies wear as well as they do: Their willingness to stop just short of realism, to build rotten, conspiracy-ridden worlds that overlap with our own but aren’t necessarily identical to it. I can believe, for instance, in a shadowy Parallax Corporation that trains assassins to take down politically-inconvenient politicians precisely because the Parallax Corporation doesn’t have any exact real-world analogues. It’s a nightmarish emanation of the military-industrial complex, a 1970s version of the Hanso Foundation, not a realistic counterpart to Northrop Grumman or Texaco or United Fruit. But Michael Clayton (like The Constant Gardener, a couple years back) is too real-world for its own good: It wants to humanize its villains, in particular, and to the extent that it succeeds it kills the suspension of disbelief required for a film like this to work.

Look: A shadowy, string-pulling, Parallax-style conglomerate might order up hits on inconvenient lawyers; that I’ll buy. So might a cigar-chomping villain out of a John Grisham melodrama; sure, why not. But Tilda Swinton, as the legal counsel for the corrupt biotech company in Michael Clayton, is just too plausible, too human, too rooted in the world I know and understand, to make it believable that she would okay not only a hit but an ostentatious car bombing (!) to save her company from a potentially ruinous class action lawsuit.

I was similarly unpersuaded by Clayton’s moral awakening – again, precisely because I bought into Clooney’s performance as his law firm’s cynical fixer. More than a decade as “the janitor” for a gang of high-priced sharks, and this guy’s shocked to discover that one of his firm’s clients ran a cost-benefit analysis on a potentially toxic weed-killer and decided to go ahead with it even though it might cause cancer? “We knew this case was rotten from the start!” Sydney Pollack’s rancid boss barks disbelievingly when confronted with Clayton’s qualms, and I sympathized with his disbelief, if not his turpitude. It’s as if David Addington suddenly strolled into Dick Cheney’s office and started acting all outraged about waterboarding.

And yet I’m not sorry I saw it. I liked the film’s mood: The wintry palette, the twilit vision of New York, upstate and down, the oppressive corporate interiors. I liked the supporting cast: even the hamming-it-up Tom Wilkinson was tolerable, and I could happily watch Pollack play white-collar creeps for hours on end. I liked the dialogue: Wilkinson’s speeches felt like warmed-over Howard Beale with a little Tyler Durden thrown in, but the rest of the script was terse and profane in a way that makes you prick up your ears and really listen. And God help me, I liked Clooney: The guy’s flat-out magnetic, even if his movies aren’t. I just wish he’d play a villain, for once, and turn all that charisma loose for evil instead of spinning it into cotton candy, or disguising it for the sake of self-righteousness and Oscars. Maybe he could play a fixer who doesn’t have a crisis of conscience – in Michael Clayton: The Early Years, let’s say? I know I’d buy a ticket.

Comments

Clooney as a villain? I like it!

You're not WGA, are you? If not, I'd say get working on that script RIGHT NOW.

Posted by Herb | November 8, 2007 8:33 AM

If Clooney played a villain, I think he'd be a lock for an Oscar (see Washington, Denzel).

I thought Wilkinson was uncharacteristically awful in Michael Clayton, and Tilda Swinton's character unrealistically demonic. Other than that, the movie was pretty good, for the reason Ross describes.

Posted by right | November 8, 2007 10:45 AM

I guess there's a genre question about Michael Clayton. To me, it seems closest to a noir-ish murder mystery-- except, of course, that the murder's not a mystery. But the 'ex-prosecutor with regrets' investigating shady deals is a standard-issue character.

But I also think that's all irrelevant because the acting and writing are so strong. Strong enough that it doesn't matter-- Clooney, Swinton, Pollack all gave great performances.

Posted by MattF | November 8, 2007 12:31 PM

Quibble over your description of The Parallax view (and I missed this the first time I saw it, too): the corporation in that movie doesn't recruit assassins -- it recruits patsies, lone nuts who can be blamed for assassinations.

Posted by julian | November 8, 2007 2:49 PM

Isn't the Bourne Supremacy's Black Briar program, the successor to the Parallax corporation. They both involve mental conditioning of the subjects;
including Warren Beatty's investigative reporter who gets lassoed into a plot against a Nashville type populist candidate. On the same plane is Munchurian Global from that hackneyed remake. On a greater scale, the eponymous "Company" from Heroes serves the same function; with "Adam Monroe" as the puppetmaster of the future apocalypse.

Posted by narciso | November 8, 2007 11:05 PM

I mostly agree with your take on the movie, but I think you may have missed why the the professional killers used a car bomb on Clooney. His character was recently in trouble with some sort of mob loan shark, so the car bomb would actually look like a mob hit instead of an ostentatious corporate murder.

The movie reminded me of Syriana - it felt like a very serious take on a complex and dark issue while you watch it, but when you think back on the plot later everything seems much more hackneyed. I guess good acting, good directing, and sparse exposition can really make a weak plot feel substantial.

Posted by l e o | November 8, 2007 11:57 PM

I completely agree with you on clooney and the tone/style of MC. To me, though, the story line of the film was really disappointing. There was really nothing all that interesting or even thought provoking about the plot. (It sort of remineded me of a History of Violence in this way - you're expecting something new and interesting and you end up with more of the same). I thought it was a really well told story though.

Posted by berger | November 9, 2007 9:53 AM