Film Review: Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007)

By Daniel Greenwood
This review contains spoilers.
via Atlas Film

Technology today - the Internet, television, DAB radio, mobile phones, mp3 players, electric shavers, curling tongs, satnavs, super hoovers - it’s everywhere. But you can turn it off. It’s also at the heart of this really rather fine film from director Tony Gilroy, a dude who had his hand in all the Bourne pies, and in Michael Clayton you can tell. The same murky throbbing that follows Matt Damon around foreign cities accompanies George Clooney (Clayton), as he deals well-enough with a gambling habit, huge debts, and worst of all an evil corporation - U-North. The face of these evil scum who hate human life and love money is Tilda Swinton, one of the film’s main roles performed by Brits pretending to be Americans. They pretend well-enough, Oscar well-enough for Swinton and Oscar near-enough for the other Brit, Tom Wilkinson, as madman Arthur Edens. But as ever it’s Clooney who steals the show with his espresso chugging jaw-line and exceptional deviation between witty and damaged.

Michael Clayton’s car is blown up early in the film, but in a Memento-esque (Christopher Nolan, 2000) manoeuvre, Gilroy gives us the ending first and then backtracks four days to witness the run-up to this fiery event. The bomb has been planted by two men who span the whole film techonologically f***ing with people who are close the to U-North’s uber-law suit. The equipment they have is a real threat to personal privacy and to human rights - this has to be a message from Michael Clayton. But there is a superlative twist at the movie’s death that underlines the premise that there’s a balance in the universe which also applies to technological advances. They can be used for good and evil. Whether Michael Clayton as a film tells us of whether it’s of use at all, is something entirely up to you or I. It works against Clayton, but then he uses it with the right people (police) in tow for it to be seen as positive.

Clayton has pissed some people off, big time. Know why? He plays it straight, brother’s a janitor. If Clayton taught me a lesson it’s that you got to use what you can to do good. You got to get your hands dirty. But Clayton’s not the primary school janitor or caretaker, he doesn’t have a dog called Blue who accompanies him in the corridors he steps proudly down with keys jangling on his belt. No, Clayton’s got Jason Bourne-syndrome - people want to blow him up. God, it’s hard being handsome.

As with any film about law or court cases there’s a lot of talk about stipulations and, well, laws. Gilroy does well to keep the film bubbling along, there are enough horrible individuals here to breed ire and thus interest. Swinton is Queen of my hatred as Karen Crowder, a character who everyone loves to hate and then feel a slight tinge of sympathy for. She’s terribly unhappy. Gilroy gives his audience the pleasure of witnessing Karen ready herself for public facades by intersplicing these images of her lonely preparation with the events she’s rehearsing for. What you have are rather scathing interpretations of public speaking in this kind of corporate arena - are these people serious? Karen says in a video interview that she loves what she does, but she also has to conjure this up as she dresses alone before hand (in another of the interspliced scenes). She has to convince herself of something she doesn’t herself believe. She’s as clueless about her life as Arthur is deranged in his underpants at a board meeting. No wonder Swinton won an award, she’s more even more convincing for appearing so painfully unconvincing.

Unlike Memento - *increases firewall protection* - Michael Clayton succeeds with the backwards storytelling routine. The film would have stood-up without the early, though only partial, revelation but it certainly gives it a sense of novelty. What you have in George Clooney is a serious actor who will get improve through his autumnal years. He’s got enough money now to experiment, just like the evil corporations.