Yeah yeah, I'm a year late, buzz off.
There were two things I found really great about Michael Clayton. Well, not exactly; there were like nine, but the others have all been rehashed to death in the postmortems of others.
Lots of films get to the point immediately. In No Country For Old Men, you get that some nasty Frenchie is chasing around a cowboy pretty quickly. In The Day After Tomorrow, there's snowball-sized hail and glacial earthquakes within the first ten minutes. Batman and Robin--isn't the first scene Chris O'Donnell and George Clooney doing triple salchows around a decidedly un-gubernatorial Mr. Freeze? My point is: This movie makes you wait. I was like "wait... what?" at regular eight-minute intervals until the film was halfway over. Tony Gilroy handled Michael Clayton like a Mexican dude unraveling a freshly-cleaned rug. There's Clooney gambling--okay, money issues, psychological issues. Tom Wilkinson going all bipolar--mysterious... what's going on here? Clooney getting Wilkinson out of jail--alright, they work for the same firm, Clooney's a go-to "fixer" guy, and this is a situation that, um, needs a fuckload of fixing. Clooney has marital issues; Tilda Swinton is a conniving bitch (a.k.a., a lawyer); Wilkinson holds in his possession very damning evidence that seals the plaintiff's case; Swinton hires thugs to kill Wilkinson and Clooney; Clooney escapes--due to a horse fetish?--and performs something that can only be classified as being a notch under a deus ex machina... It all just slowly reveals itself to you. Most films tell you what is going to happen upfront; a running marquee saying "CLASS ACTION SUIT GOES WRONG, DEFENDANT'S COUNSEL TRIES TO KILL OPPOSITION, CLOONEY SAVES THE DAY" would be pretty much standard operating procedure in 98% of Hollywood films. Luckily, Gilroy escaped the conventions. And man, it works.
My second "highlight" was the degree to which this was truly an insider's film (or at least the degree to which I think this was truly an insider's film). "The West Wing," for mainstream television, is wonky as all hell--which is no surprise, considering former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers and former Senate Finance Committe chief of staff Lawrence O'Donnell pretty much pulled the strings behind the scenes. No layman has any fucking idea what is going on in the West Wing. The show, therefore, is incredibly revelatory, purely by its very nature. Whereas "The Office" isn't: Everyone has worked in an office. Michael Clayton features an incredibly high-end New York law firm where Harvard Law on one's resume is required and high-end, multi-million dollar apartments are simply the employee standard. Its top guys are all masters of the profession, and it even employs a "fixer" (Michael Clayton), who, like, is on call 24/7 to handle really fucked-up shit. He's a legal version of Pulp Fiction's Wolf. Anyway, the bottom line is: I don't have a clue about the internal politics and policies of top NYC law firms. So Michael Clayton is really neat insofar as it gives me a very long glimpse--however embellished it may be--into the world of the five-thousand-dollar-suit attorneys. It wasn't particularly stylized or Boiler Room-y, but it kept me rapt nevertheless.
Highly recommend, this one was really good.
