Movie Review: Michael Clayton (2007)

A conspiracy drama, Michael Clayton is a cerebral thriller focusing on the underbelly of big corporate machinations in the era of globalization.

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a fixer on contract with a large New York corporate law firm run by Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack). Michael's job is to make bad news stories go away for the firm's clients. Michael is also recovering from a severe gambling problem and is trying to get away from the rat race, but his attempts to start a restaurant business backfire. Nearly bankrupt, he is under pressure to come up with a lot of money, and fast. With Bach and his team leading a settlement conference representing the interests of large agricultural firm uNorth, Michael narrowly escapes an assassination attempt while on an upstate business trip. He is forced to take stock of what exactly is going on at the law firm.

Four days earlier, Michael was called to Milwaukee to deal with a crisis precipitated by senior lawyer Arthur Edens (Tom Wilknson) suffering a mental breakdown during a deposition. Arthur was the lead lawyer on the uNorth case, defending the firm against a class-action suit involving allegations of poisoned soil on small farms. uNorth's ruthless internal general counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is not impressed with Arthur's disintegration, and even less impressed with Michael's pragmatic reaction to the crisis. Michael starts to investigate what may have pushed his friend Arthur over the edge of sanity, while Karen sets in motion an alternative plan to save her firm's reputation.

Directed and written by Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton is slick, cool and intellectual. Despite no shortage of criminal activity up to and including severe physical harm, the story is intended to stay just on the right side of grounded, with enough careful credibility to keep the narrative within plausible limits while also serving up excellent entertainment.

Michel Clayton demands concentration and rewards it handsomely. This is a film where scenes are sometimes joined mid-stream, while others appear to truncate early. Nothing is over-explained; the threads are laid out slowly, carefully, but not necessarily in an easy-to-weave pattern. All the events take place over just a few hectic days, but the subtle shift in perspective that occurs in starting near the climax and then drawing back to a few days prior achieves the desired unhinging effect.

Gilroy reveals his secrets on his own terms and according to his chosen pace, and the pay-off is immense. Once the conspiracy starts to take shape it all makes sinister sense, and the events are all driven out of a sense of knee-jerk desperation by corporate leaders wielding enormous power and pushing the envelope due to incredible strain. None of the characters have all the answers, plenty of loose ends remain beyond the reach of any tidying up, and the mess of corporate chicanery represents a familiar spiraling public relations disaster leaving many scattered victims in its wake.

The story boils down to a battle of wills between Michael and Karen, and they only meet twice, at the beginning and end of Michael's ordeal. They are two deeply flawed individuals, wracked by insecurity. In Michael's case his failures are now almost fully public, his humiliation complete once he has to grovel for a loan from Marty. Karen's anxieties are more concealed, but Gilroy bores into her fragile psyche with astonishing scenes of Karen practicing her public persona in private, the general counsel able to hide her jitters from everyone except the woman in the mirror.

George Clooney keeps his charisma wattage in check and delivers an understated performance, one of his most powerful and compelling screen achievements. Swinton gets fewer scenes but is equally magnificent, creating for Karen an icy exterior to conceal demons waiting to burst forth in all the wrong directions. Tom Wikinson and Sydney Pollack lend weighty veteran support, and Michael O'Keefe makes an appearance as another unapologetic shark in the corporate boardroom.

Michael Clayton is a rare example of a supremely smart thriller, where the battle lines are vague and the puppet masters may be hidden in business suits, but are no less lethal for it.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.

The Movies of Sydney Pollack

All movies starring Sydney Pollack and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Three Days Of The Condor (1975, voice only, uncredited, also Director)

The Electric Horseman (1979, uncredited, also Director)

Tootsie (1982, also Director)

The Player (1992)

Death Becomes Her (1992, uncredited)

Husbands And Wives (1992)

A Civil Action (1998)

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Random Hearts (1999, also Director)

Changing Lanes (2002)

The Interpreter (2005, also Director)

Michael Clayton (2007)

Made Of Honour (2008)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Husbands And Wives (1992)

Woody Allen delves into the soul of the institution of marriage through the lives of two couples. Husbands And Wives uncovers a complex web of dependence, resentment, longing and confusion.

A pair of middle-aged married couples are also best friends. At the start of a dinner outing, Jack and Sally (Sydney Pollack and Judy Davis) suddenly and nonchalantly announce that they are splitting up, shocking Gabe and Judy (Allen and Mia Farrow). Judy, an arts magazine editor, is particularly disturbed, and begins to question the strength of her marriage to Gabe. They have been drifting apart, can't agree on whether or not they want to have a child, and Gabe's position as a university professor of literature exposes him to plenty of temptation in the form of fawning young female students.

And indeed, Gabe starts spending time with Rain (Juliette Lewis), one of his students. She is independent, beautiful and thinks the world of him. Meanwhile, Jack enters into a relationship with the much younger Sam (Lysette Anthony), a health-obsessed aerobics teacher. Sally pretends to be enjoying life as a single woman, but in reality she is miserable. Judy eventually introduces Sally to Michael (Liam Neeson), a co-worker at the magazine, and they seem to hit it off, although Michael wants to progress the relationship faster than Sally is ready for. Judy actually harbours strong feelings for Michael, a further strain on her unraveling relationship with Gabe.

Allen, who directed and also wrote the screenplay, picks up on several difficult but pervasive themes. Both Jack and Gabe start relationships with younger women, as they get an ego boost by interacting with appreciative women who could almost be their daughters. Allen pushes further, exploring the limits of these cross-generational relationships. Sam's obsession with astrology and health begins to aggravate Jack, while Gabe gets a rude awakening with Rain's scalpel-like honesty in criticizing his work from the perspective of a more liberated era.

Both Sally and Judy are exceedingly difficult to please. Sally is a perfectionist who can never be fully complimentary about anything, and insists on picking away at any little item that does not fully satisfy her. Judy is used to getting her way with an understated victim act, turning most issues in her favour by magnifying the impact to her happiness yet rarely acknowledging the feelings of others. When Jack and Sally announce their split Judy is more upset than either of them, and when Gabe agrees to her request that they can try and have a child, she abruptly changes her mind with no acknowledgement of his attempt to please her.

Husbands And Wives pokes into many of the awkward issues faced by married couples, including reduced sexual activity, boredom, lack of attentiveness and the aggravation caused by over-familiarity. And yet the film also starts to find the strands that bind, the core strengths that can hold a relationship together despite all the buffeting. Accommodation, forgiveness and tolerance emerge as themes late in the movie, as one couple discover that the frustrations also comes with plenty of comforts.

Stylistically Husbands And Wives is all about the hand-held camera hovering right around the living rooms and bedrooms of adults talking through their crises. Most of the film consists of exceedingly long takes, the camera moving along with the actors from room to room as conversations intensify, heat-up, then cool down, only to re-ignite. The viewer is effectively invited into the homes and intimate lives of Jack, Sally, Gabe and Judy, for better or for worse.

The four central performances are good without being exceptional. There is a slight element of theatricality, and an absence of genuine deeply emotional tones, as Allen keeps the mood generally light and looks for hints of humour despite the serious topics. The characters speak directly to the camera at regular intervals, the fake interviews used as a mechanism to further elaborate on their thoughts and actions. It's a gimmicky technique that is not really needed in the context of the movie.

Husbands And Wives proved to be fiction echoing stranger fact for Allen, as around the time of its release his long-term real-life relationship with Farrow ended and he became romantically involved with the much younger Soon-Yi Previn, Farrow's adopted daughter. Men and women may never fully understand the forces of attraction and repulsion between them, only that the chemistry can become exceedingly messy.

All Ace Black Blog Movie Reviews are here.