Michael Clayton...movie review

[shadowkat]

Applied for yet another position at HBO - this makes four applications in the last two years, and three within the last three months. I have no idea why I keep bothering. The only way in HBO appears to be if you know someone or have a friend who works there, and I emphatically do not. Oh well, did get a few things done today - cleaned my apartment more or less, still can't quite get rid of all the clutter, went grocery shopping, went to the movie Michael Clayton with Wales - and had drinks and dinner later, where I proceeded to bore her with my job lay off woes. I've passed the stages of shock and denial and am now full throtal in anger mode. But as luck would have it - there's no one I can take my anger out on. So it is festering inside like an angry boil screaming to be popped. I keep having little ranting sessions inside my head which go no where except to make me despise myself for having them.


Michael Clayton

Interesting flick. Demands quite a bit from the audience - and is reminiscent of the 1970s and early 1980's character films such as Five Easy Pieces, They Shoot Horses Don't They, Save the Tiger, Network, The Verdict, Absence of Malice, and Taxi Driver. These were films that you had to sit and think about, concentrate on, and listen to. You didn't just escape into. Also there isn't much action in them, they unravel slowly and often will often be filled with long gaps of silence.

Michael Clayton stars George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack (who I've met in person and listened to a Q&A in an intimate session in college - he's the one who told me that the problem with Hollywood was whatever you created and poured your soul into, regardless of the awards you got? It's never ever good enough. And they are always asking you about your next picture. OR what you've done for them lately. Making movies is a bit like being stuck on an endless treadmill reaching for and never quite getting the proverbial carrot), and Tom Wilkinson (one of my all time favorite character actors). It's about a man's crisis of conscience and the circumstances that lead this main, the title character, to do what he decides to do and how he feels about it along the way. It is not a story about a court case or a political piece, but a story about a man who has sold out and now feels stuck, and is struggling desperately to get unstuck.

Ken Levine in his review compared the film favorably with Network, Erin Brokanvich, and The Verdict. Of the three films, it reminds me the most of Network - and Tilda Swinton's performance reminded me quite a bit of Faye Dunway's.
If you've never seen Network - you really should, if anything it will send a chill up your spine on how closely it resembles the world we are living in now - even more than it resembled the world it was depicting at the time.

Clayton is set up in a similar manner to the tv series Damages - in that we start the movie four days in the future, then flashbackwards until we eventually catch up to those four days and everything is finally played out. The device works - which is an accomplishment in of itself, since I've seen tv shows and films where it did not work. Jumping around in time is about as dicey as jumping point of views. Clayton also is into details, visual details. Such as listening to a voice over as we star at blank office rooms being cleaned by janitors - a metaphor for what the lead character does for a living - he's the Mr. Fix-it, the miracle worker, the cleaner, the janitor - who cleans up the company and the company's client's messes. Another image that sticks in my head long after the movie finished was Tilda Swinton scrunched up in a ladies bathroom, touching her sweaty armpit and staring in stressed hope at a bag with UNorth on it. I've met the character Tilda Swinton plays in this film. She has an icy cold veneer yet at the same time gets across a fragile and scared interior - like a fox perpetually caught in the headlights of an on-coming car. Her character is all the more frightening because I know it is real.

Unlike most films, we know at the end of this one who these people are, we as an audience, like or not, have walked ten miles in Michael Clayton's been under his skin. We know what he is thinking even if he doesn't say it and we know why. And in some absurd way, we know that Michael Clayton is us or known to us.

One of the best metaphors in the film is shown at the very beginning on a screen on the wall of Clayton's son's room during a tracking shot that flows over the child's action figures, and a huge green spider - the shot is repeated twice in the film - and both times the camera settles for a minute on the screen - a huge red circle with the words REALM+CONQUEST spelled out in the center. It is - we learn part of a game the son plays with his father - a type of card game. It is also a book he loans to his father's friend, Arthur, portrayed by Tom Wilkinson. Shortly after the words are shown to us - we see one of Clayton's co-workers ask about the on-coming merger with the big London firm. The merger hangs in the background just as those words do. Realm+Conquest.

What, the film asks, are we prepared to do to conguer the realm of another? What is more important? Karen Kroder defensively tries out different answers to the question of "life-work balance" in front of her mirror as she dresses for work. Finally deciding to merely side-step it. She is so defined by her job she ceases to exist outside of it. While Clayton has lost almost everything in an attempt to be able to walk away from his - he's only staying with it because his gamble did not work out but one can see how his job has beaten him down, stooped, heavy bags under his eyes, and tired beyond all reason, he shuffles as opposed to walks. So intense is Clooney's performance that even the body language conveys who his character is and what his character is feeling. It is not until close to the end that we see a glimmer of the trademark Clooney charm - but it lasts no more than a second and makes perfect sense when it does show up.

This may be amongst the best films I've seen this year. It plays with my head, it's images rolling about, asking to be contemplated. Examining again and again the difficult and complex emotions that inhabit its characters and how those characters choose to act on them.

Overall Rating:A+

Comments

My grade: A-

[cjlasky.livejournal.com]

If anybody else is reading this response....spoilers ahead!



Loved this movie....for the most part. However, I thought the time tinkering didn't work, because it placed the focus of the movie on what I thought was the weakest part: the attempted assassination.

Paula and I went out of the theater going, "That was great!" The scene in the alley between Michael and Arthur, the final showdown between Michael and Karen, every scene with Sydney Pollock (Pollock's stolen movie count: 2), the whole bit with Karen rehearsing her "causal patter"--just great, great stuff. Agree completely, reminiscent of the character-study films of the late 70s, and worthy of that comparison.

But Tony Gilroy (writer/director) almost lost me at the beginning. When Michael left the car to see the pretty horsies, I was going, "Ohhhhkaaay." Were they symbols of the freedom he had lost? Were they the "horses" he needed to take down UNorth once and for all? The symbolism seemed forced in such a gritty, hyper-realistic character study.

And it's difficult to believe that professional assassins--who killed Arthur in chillingly efficient style--couldn't get their shit together and make sure their quarry was in the damn car when it blew! Never mind the horsies--suppose Michael had stopped to get some gas and a snack? Suppose he was off on the side of the road taking a whizz? There were many possible reasons he might have been out of the car, and the black ops guys should have known that. Their sloppiness pulled me out of the movie a bit, and knocked a half-point off the ratings.

Otherwise? Terrific.

[cjlasky.livejournal.com]

P.S.: I can't believe Don Jeffries (the Ken Howard character) signed off on that memo. Did he READ it?