Michael Clayton

Near the end of the film, the title character, played by George Clooney, drives his son Henry back home from a relative’s house.  The car ride is seen from a nerve-wracking angle, as if they could crash at any moment.  Clooney’s expression is angry and vacant at the same time.  All of a sudden, he stops the car, and looks straight at Henry. “…You’re not going to be one of these people that goes through life wondering why shit is falling out of the sky around them.  I know that.  I know it.  OK?   I see it every time I look at you.  I see it right now.  I don’t know where you got it from, but you got it.  OK?”  Frustration, anger, uncertainty, and love are all harnessed into a subtle, weary gleam in his eyes – and it’s downright spooky. 

Michael Clayton is a special type of attorney called a “fixer,” dealing with clients’ screw-ups and scandals.  Arthur Edens, the head defense attorney for agricultural giant U/North, is faced with a dilemma: a contaminant in his client’s weed-killer product is responsible for the death of 468 farmers, and he’s the only one that knows about it.  The combination of Edens’s guilt and his bipolarity turns him berserk during a deposition, where he strips naked and proclaims his love for one of the plaintiffs.  Clayton’s job, then, is to cover that up, to make sure that U/North still has the upper hand.  So Edens’s burden is transferred to him.  And when Karen Crowder, chief counsel of U/North, finds out that Edens (and now, Clayton) possesses a document that would ruin her company, she takes decisive, even violent, action. 

Pretty simple, right?  If you tried to figure it out the plot yourself, though, the movie might have passed you by and you would have missed some of the best writing in recent years.  Screenwriter and director Tony Gilroy is shrewdly self-aware – his Bourne scripts haven’t exactly been centered on dialogue.  So while his last screenplay started with a suspenseful chase, Gilroy’s directorial debut starts with a fervent Edens monologue that provides the thematic lens for the film.  “Is this me? Am I this freak organism that’s been sent here to sleep and eat and defend this one horrific chain of carcinogenic molecules?  Is that my destiny, is that my fate?  Is that it, Michael?  Is that my grail?  Is that the correct answer to the multiple choice of me?”  The camera focuses on nothing in particular: an empty room, a janitor, a stack of papers.  It’s a declaration: this isn’t a flashy action flick, so pay attention.  

Careful, cerebral, and eloquent dialogue in a film is pervasive, and it enhances every aspect of it – the scenery, the silences, and in Michael Clayton’s case, the ambiguous expressions on George Clooney’s face.  I don’t mean to discount Clooney’s sublime performance, but with the lines like he has, who could have messed this up?  When the end credits start to pulsate on the lower right corner of the screen, the camera focuses on his eyes.  He stares out into space as his taxi drives him aimlessly around New York City.  This goes on for two minutes; those two minutes give moviegoers enough time to, first, realize that the movie is over, second, internalize how bad-ass that last scene was, and third, reconsider the moral dilemma Michael Clayton may or may not have won. 

The film’s power comes not from any moral victory, but from its careful, profound portrayal of a man struggling in today’s corporate world.  “You can’t just suddenly stop and say ‘that’s it, game over, I’m into miracles.’ ”  And its essentially unmarketable title emphasizes that the movie isn’t about making the right decisions or about beating the enemy, whoever that may be.  The focus is quite literally Michael Clayton, who is human, modern, multi-dimensional, and aching inside.