Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/14/07
The ads make it look like
a cross between Erin Brockovich and Disclosure: a fast-paced
red meat legal thriller about an ethically challenged lawyer at war with
both his own conscience and the dirty deeds of the farm-poisoning conglomerate
he's defending. Well, some of that stuff is kicking around inside
Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, but the last thing you'd call Michael
Clayton is fast-paced. A triumph of mood and character, it's
something of a stretch to call the artfully dispiriting film a “thriller”
at all. Instead, it puts its' hero (a sensationally beaten-down George
Clooney) through the paces of one, but each step simply re-enforces the
cold facts of his existence. Yes, there are evil corporations in
Michael
Clayton killing innocent people with their defective products, but
the movie's real horror is its' contention that no matter how “successful”
you become, the American Dream is a joyless lie.
Yes, Michael Clayton (Clooney)
has a business card that'll tell you he's a lawyer, but he's actually a
“fixer”, the guy who swoops down when rich people screw up and makes their
problems go away. This skill makes him very valuable to those at
his firm, led by friend Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), but has left him without
a title, a partnership, or much in the way of assets. A bar he tried
to open with his brother (David Lansbury) has gone belly-up and now he's
left holding $75,000.00 in debt shadowy people want repaid NOW. At
this moment, a new job is dropped into his lap: old friend Arthur
Edens (Tom Wilkinson) had been working a case for chemical giant U-North
for six years, drowning farmers suing over a dangerous pesticide in paperwork
and making it difficult for them to continue the case. But Arthur
is bipolar, and something inspired him to go off his meds. Now, he's
obsessed with the daughter (Merritt Wever, who does a wonderful job of
seeming like a normal person rather than an actor playing one) of one of
the farmers, and starts stripping and declaring his love in the middle
of a deposition. When Michael arrives to “handle” him, he tries to
run interference while unimpressed U-North counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda
Swinton) becomes more and more nervous, finally looking for her own ways
to make Arthur “go away”. The deeper into the case Michael gets,
the clearer it becomes that his friend had discovered damning evidence
of what everyone at the firm had always known in their hearts: he
was wasting years of his life defending murderers. But if they're
willing to kill their costumers without batting an eye, why would U-North
mind getting rid of a few meddling lawyers?
Story isn't Michael Clayton's
strength. The “smoking gun” of U-North's complicity is revealed early
on, and it's a plot point I've seen in many movies back to the one time
it really did shock me, in the otherwise unmemorable 1991 Gene Hackman
vehicle Class Action. Because we don't really get to know
the victims or much of what they went through, the corporate crimes remain
abstract, and the climax suggests that exposing them isn't particularly
difficult. Instead, what we have is a grim but fascinating character
study. Presumably there was a time when Michael, with his good looks
and slick social skills, was sure that he'd live the high life as a New
York lawyer, but his reality is depressingly banal. He rents his
dark apartment, leases his nice car through the firm, shares custody of
a son (Austin Williams) he loves but doesn't really connect with, and is
looked on with casual contempt by his family. It's just God-awful
SAD to be Michael Clayton, and Clooney quietly slumps and twitches and
looks about to break at a moment's notice. It would be easy to say
we were looking at the accumulation of one man's mistakes if not for the
movie's other portraits of “success”. Arthur has devoted “12% of
my life” to one case with no ethical foundation, and even before he breaks,
it's clear his life was utterly empty (no one even knows where his daughter
is: probably somewhere in Europe). Wilkinson is tremendous,
totally without a net as he rails and rants and goes off on manic tangents,
his illness giving him what his fortune could not: a sense that he
is free and just. But even then, the deal with the devil (did I mention
that Gilroy wrote the definitive “The Law is Hell” thriller: 1997's
The
Devil's Advocate?) that he made by signing on for the case in the first
place is not so easily broken. Then there's Karen: she's got
the rank and the position Michael lacks, but it's really the same job,
and she stresses and agonizes over each action, each word that comes out
of her mouth so intensely that she can't even be interviewed without rehearsing
all the answers endlessly beforehand. There are two things Swinton
is really special at: teeth-gnashing evil (as in Constantine
and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
and trying to hold herself together under stress that seems likely to snap
her like a twig (as in her star-making turn in The Deep End), and
here she's holding all the cards but still spends the movie twitching in
the death-grip of the fact that any moment, it's all coming down.
While their positions may afford them the comfort of having people like
Karen and Michael as fall-guys, even their bosses (Pollack and Ken Howard)
show no particular happiness to be who they are. All these characters
are cogs in a machine that's literally killing us to keep the stock prices
up, and they're not even enjoying the fruits of their labors. I found
the whole thing utterly heartbreaking.
Gilroy shows a real gift
for this director thing: he sets the kind of realistic tone of ever-present
danger that people have always falsely attributed to the Jason Bourne spy
franchise he wrote all three screenplays for. Even when its' characters
wield massive conspiratorial power and influence, they're still in the
grip of fear and the possibility of failure. Michael can sneak in
and out of crime scenes, but the threat of being caught is very real.
A car bomb could take any of the characters out at any moment. And
I particularly loved a scene where Karen speaks to one of her hired goons
(Robert Prescott) in code to try and preserve plausible deniability while
he struggles with the fact that he's not really sure what the hell she's
saying.
Ironically, it's as a writer
that Gilroy has some problems. I know you don't get to the top of
THAT profession without an innate ability to follow the Syd Field screenwriting
rules, but his effort to start the movie with a bang by beginning with
key scenes near the end of the story puts too many of his cards on the
table and results in the tension leaking out of the story at just the moment
when it should be building. And perhaps it's a case of getting too
caught up in his own spell of cold realism, but there are key moments in
Michael's journey that should be hit harder, or at least underlined more
than they are.
Like a lot of this fall's
dramas, Michael Clayton sets a deliberate, quiet tone a lot of people
will simply find boring. But if you're in there with the actors,
their poor, unhappy characters, and what their plight says about us all,
it's a fascinating, captivating movie, one that might make you think twice
the next time you see a high-roller on TV and wish yourself into their
shoes. |
