Michael Clayton

After seeing "Superbad" last weekend, I needed a grown-up antidote and this movie is certainly that. A slow moving, adult, serious movie with a message.

The movie has a number of themes including ageing, corruption, principles and truth. The movie's message is that there is more to life than making money.

The acting is uniformly good but Clooney is outstanding. His character is complex and he's pretty unhappy with what he has become. But it's all done very subtly. There are no obvious messages in this movie. As another reviewer wrote, you have to pay attention.

Don't read too much into my "slow moving/slow burner" descriptions. This movie is not boring. It just doesn't whiz along with one implausible twist after another. It's evenly paced with an almost complete lack of silly plot lines (there was no need for the lawyer in crisis to remove his clothes during a trial).

Everyone involved in this movie deserves praise for producing a challenging, grown-up, movie-with-a-message in the face of a torrent of mindless nonsense.

Highly recommended.

I'm a student of noir. Its an American invention, something like jazz, and has colored film and therefore narrative deeply and permanently.

My definition of noir centers on the world between the viewer and the story. In the ordinary instance, the characters (usually one man and his girl) find themselves in a world where the laws of cause and happenstance are artificial. Things don't happen as they normally would in life, rather they are arranged. Things are artificially jiggered to produce a story that works for the storyteller. Odd circumstances. Strange coincidences. Unlikely relationships. Things serialized, compressed and displayed for the convenience of the viewer.

The thing that's characteristic of conventional noir is that the thing starts with a real reality. We have a common fellow, nominally a Jimmy Stewart type, who is living a normal life and who gets lifted into a noir fate. What makes this so flexible is that we the viewer become gods, jerking around the character. This allows for all sorts of clever ironies and narrative folding because we implicitly become agents in the story.

But if you are a modern screenwriter or filmmaker, your greatest challenge (usually) is what to do about this. Its something that Soderbergh and Clooney worry about. What we have here is pretty basic noir, elaborated in three dimensions.

The first is that they chose to make our noir hero a full character. No Philip Marlowe here; this guy is comparatively fleshed out and played by someone who knows how to do so.

The second twist has been done before. They add in the world of law. That world has a different ontology in matters of cause and truth, so is a handy one for noir games. For lawyers if something really is true it doesn't matter. Its only true if there is admissible proof that it is so. Cause, the basic thing that is at the root of noir fate, has a similar disconnect between the real and the legal. Normally, this would just be a background element. But here there is something novel.

Clayton's son has a fixation on precisely these matters of real and unreal worlds. There's lots of talk about how they blend, and a terrific device of a lawyer who decides to "change sides." That means shifting from the evil corporation to the ordinary girl, at the same time shifting from memos to a fantasy book — he literally puts a "new cover" on a key document. And he shifts from sanity to madness. A key plot point, by the way is that he never did anything without leaving a memo.

This is terrific writing and reason to see the thing by itself. Kid, book, reality.

The third twist is that we have two noir characters. The woman here isn't just a moll along for the ride. She's Tilda Swinton for heaven sakes, someone equally caught up in circumstance. She's probably in her position because of past sexual favors and trying hard to "perform." She's as manipulated by the story as the Clooney character. Its a bit novel and very well done. She's good to have around.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

This film marks an incredible directorial debut for Tony Gilroy. He was an accomplished screenwriter - and his script for MC is immaculate - but his direction was inspired with confidence and craftsmanship. Immaculate performances across the board - especially from Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson. Masterful storytelling and nearly perfect execution. The look and feel of the world was perfectly calibrated. It's one of the those films that gets even stronger with age. There's so much happening in his film, to re-watch is overcome with revelations. I love this film so much. I really wish they made films this smart and well-crafted more often these days. It's just not the kind of film that movie studios care to make anymore. Sadly.

I love this movie - I have watched it many times, most recently last night. It has one of the best collections of superb performances you'll find, wrapped in an anti-corporate Erin Brokovich-like story structure. But what's really going on is the individual characters. George Clooney is so under rated. He has a clear understanding of his role at his firm - he's a fixer, a janitor. But he's really good at it and it's allowed him to fund his other hobbies. The interaction between him and his brother is so subtle New York class structure: brother's a cop so sees his brother as a fancy lawyer; Clooney's coworkers know his background and see him as a cop. Tom Wilkinson is incredible. Lead attorney at the firm, leading their defense of their client, a giant ag company accused of poisoning people. A non-showy naturalistic performance showing someone going off their medication. Or is he just waking up and deciding not to sell his soul anymore? It's a Peter Finch/Network level performance, I kid you not. And finally, my girl Tilda Swinton. She is never ever boring. She is ostensibly the face of the villain in this story. And yet Tilda does something really interesting here. She allows you inside this character's job in a male-dominated corporation, in an awful industry, you understand her ambition, but she lets you see how over her head she feels she is. She makes her character's anxiety palpable. And yet, when the inevitable confrontation happens: she deserves it. You get the feeling, though, that had she been smarter and stronger, the men she works for would never have allowed her to be around. So ultimately they did this to themselves. Finally, the elegant plot structure. You begin near the end, go back to the beginning, and then go past where you started to the end. "I am Siva, the god of death"

There aren't many movies that I enjoy watching twice or more, this is certainly one of them. This is in the running to be my favorite movie of all time. This movie can be hard to follow, and can seem vulgar at times, but in reality the dialogue has a higher purpose: to illustrate how we can get lost in our personal objectives and lose track of the bigger picture. The majority of characters in this movie don't fall into the "good guy", "bad guy" category, they are various shades of gray, just like real people. If one puts themselves in the shoes of the characters, their actions are plausible and consistent with reality. If you don't want to have your brain challenged by a time-line that bounces around and a complicated story that requires the viewer to put the pieces together you might want to save this for another night, but don't miss it, it's an incredible piece of writing and filmmaking.