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Pat and Regan at the Movies

By Patrick MacKenzie and Regan Taylor

An exciting, heroic
role for Clooney

Michael Clayton already came and went on movie
screens, but it’s back in some theatres, enjoying a brief
pre-Oscar revival as one of the much-nominated but less-
seen flicks that have suddenly become worth watching
because they’re up for awards. Its return is nothing

but a good thing; this film deserves to be seen. It’s got
everything you could ask from this genre (a fluid hybrid of political thriller and
David vs. Goliath moral tale). It’s got an outstanding cast, a just-twisty-enough
script with a satisfying conclusion, and above all, a conscience. In fact, that’s what
Michael Clayton is about: conscience, and what happens when it sneaks into the
formerly cold hearts of powerful corporate attorneys.

What happens, of course, is that their employers get very upset. In this
case, the attorney is Arthur Edens, played with crazy-eyed gusto by veteran
British actor Tom Wilkinson. The employers are a gigantic New York law firm
and their client, an agricultural mega-corporation who’s been shelling out for six
years in order to thwart a class action suit. Edens, under the stress of defending
an essentially evil company, goes off his meds and freaks out during a deposition,
professing his love for one of the plaintiffs. The client, naturally, is not impressed
and will do whatever it takes to fix the situation.

Director and screenwriter Tony Gilroy (who also co-wrote The Bourne
Ultimatum; audiences will find certain thematic similarities here) does some fancy
wrangling with chronology, so that Edens’ monologue from his jail cell after that
manic episode is what we hear first. His disembodied voice, ranting about the
“patina of shit” he wears from doing the work of giant, ruthless corporations, floats
over top of shots of sweaty legal aides. Even though we don’t know whose voice
this is yet, the scene is incredibly arresting. And that’s just the opening credits.

From there it gets knottier and tenser—evil pesticides manufacturers with
a lot to lose are not the kind of folks you want to upset, especially if they’re paying
you to be on their side. When the head of their in-house legal counsel (a twitchy
Tilda Swinton) learns of the attorney’s mental break, things turn ugly. And then the
eternally likable George Clooney shows up as Michael Clayton. He’s a fixer for
Edens’ firm, cleaning up legal messes before they get out, using dubious methods
to do so. And while he’s not aware of it yet, his conscience is ready to make an
appearance too.

Giving away any more of the plot would be criminal; this movie’s not
entirely unpredictable, but the story’s little surprises make this so much more than
just a simple thriller. While it has very little “action” to speak of, it’s more exciting
than most action flicks out there. There’s no romance whatsoever, but there’s
profound human compassion. And in Clooney’s hangdog portrayal of Clayton, it
has something other thrillers rarely have: a realistic, conflicted, interesting hero.
Clayton is someone worth rooting for.

- Regan Taylor

 

 

 

February 25, 2008

A dark story of
wealth and power

Michael Clayton begins with a series of night

shots passing over and through the office towers of
Manhattan. As the camera presents the audience with
the faceless centres of commerce and law, we hear a
voiceover spoken through a phone with the clarity of a
manic-depressive. The voice belongs to Arthur Edens
(Tom Wilkinson) and here’s part of what he has to say: “I realized, Michael, at that
moment, that I had emerged—as I have done nearly every day for the past 28 years
of my life—not through the portals of our huge and powerful law firm, but rather
from... an organism whose sole function is to excrete the poison—the ammo—the
defoliant—necessary for even larger and more dangerous organisms to destroy the
miracle of humanity.”

Edens’ convoluted yet intensely clear monologue sets both the high pace
and tension of the film right from the start—and it doesn’t let up. But it is Michael
Clayton’s central theme of power (and the lengths people will go to maintain it)
that makes the film an anxiety-ridden meditation on corporate life and the price it
exacts from its participants.

As lead defense counsel for agribusiness giant UNorth fending off a
massive class action lawsuit, Edens discovers he has been on the wrong end of a
fight after 16 years of litigation. Foregoing his medication (Edens suffers from bi-
polar disorder), he has a manic episode during an on-camera discovery meeting.
Naturally, the corporate brass at UNorth are freaked out. Fearing the loss of a
client with very deep pockets, Edens’ firm sends out “fixer” Michael Clayton to the
hinterlands of America to bring their top defense attorney to heel. But in the end, it
is not Edens’ erratic behaviour that frightens UNorth, it is the fact that Edens is in
possession of documents that prove his client to be an unethical, indeed downright
evil organization.

Michael Clayton could easily have been played as a good versus bad
morality tale along the lines of a John Grisham made-for-the-screen novel, but the
conflicted natures of the central characters consigns the film’s moral center to a
permanent grey zone. Neither character is presented as a foil for the others because
all of them have been slogging it out in the same moral vacuum for decades.
Clayton himself, played with a broken dishevelment by George Clooney, has spent
a career fixing the “mistakes” of a certain class of people with the money to pay for
his services, while head counsel for UNorth, Karen Crowder, performed by Tilda
Swinton as though she were on nothing but a diet of ice cubes and speed, seems to
act out of desperation at the behest of her corporate overlords rather than from any
psychopathic intent.

Despite one plot oversimplification and an ending bordering on the
melodramatic, Michael Clayton, saved by its exploration of moral ambiguity,
remains a superb film about the damage caused by the pursuit of wealth and power.
Given that Edens, who himself is inextricably linked to the same regime of greed
that his clients are committed to, is able to acknowledge that he has been serving
an “even larger and more dangerous organism,” suggests a moral victory no matter
how difficult Michael Clayton makes it to find.

- Pat Mackenzie

 

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