Or–maybe a better post title–The Return of the Excellent Issue Film. Saw in theaters the superb Michael Clayton, which has a first half begun with a voice-over monologue by Tom Wilkinson and follows up with a pitch-perfect succession of rants, debates, and asides that struck me as the richest dialogue I’d heard at the movies in some time. The second half softens the impact, becomes more conventionally a conspiracy-of-corporate-malfeasance thriller, and the dialogue fades more into the background… but hoo boy does it roar when it begins. A shout-out for the egoless and yet compassionate portrayal of a corporate-lawyer baddie by Tilda Swinton: she turns what could be a cartoon villain, and potentially a misogynist depiction of the icy castrator, into a detailed and generous portrait of a complex woman as torn by divisions as the protagonist. Everyone in this is good, and the writing whistles, and the film races along–and comes to a conclusion that offers us the kind of meat-and-potatoes closure we want while also keeping us hungry, uncertain, concerned. It’s a damn good film.
Swinton is equally strong in the small wonder Stephanie Daley, about a young girl who hid her pregnancy and then either killed or suffered the loss of her infant at birth. Swinton is the psychologist grappling with her own pregnancy, a prior stillbirth, and confusions over her self and her relationship with husband Timothy Hutton. Amber Tamblyn is excellent as the accused young girl. For the first half, it felt too often like the winner of a short-story competition, all these carefully-drawn parallels between the protagonists, a slew of complications which felt like sincere issue-picture problems to be resolved (gender, power, choice)… but by the second half I was glued to the set and the emotional repercussions, underplayed and entirely earned, ripple out with no clear sense of closure or completion. I really dug this film, too.
Yes, Michael Clayton is a great neo-noir with a complex temporal structure, lightning sharp dialogue, fine cinematography from Robert Elswit (Magnolia, Syriana), and an anti-heroic performance by Clooney. There is a moment in a car after an awkward meeting between Clayton and his alcoholic brother that brims over with barely contained rage, and Clooney controls the scene with a gloriously static intensity. Not a lot really happens in this shadowy character study (there are no Tom Cruise/Jerry Bruckheimer moments of action-film razzle dazzle), yet Gilroy and company manage to generate a mood of affective disorientation (I walked away feeling disturbed and uneasy). Additionally, the film lacks the kind of sentimentalism that mars Paul Newman’s similarly themed The Verdict. And Reynolds is on target about Swinton’s exquisite performance choices. There is a throw-away moment in a toilet stall that conveys so much without giving anything away. She’s quite remarkable and fiercely brave in the way she utilizes her body and her dowdy corporate power suits to give us a complex portrait of an anxious and tortured, white-collar criminal.
swinton is great as the angel gabriel in constantine. let’s face it, she’s great in everything.
I watched Stephanie Daley last night and while I found it moderately engaging, it felt a bit overcooked to me (with a high octane, movie-of-the-week vibe). I generally have a hard time with Swinton when she’s playing “regular” people (I respond to her as many respond to Nicole Kidman; her avant-garde roots and chiseled porcelain features get me all verfremdungy inside). Having enjoyed Amber Tamblyn’s work in “Joan of Arcadia” a few years back, I found her work here to be a bit too forced as if she was constantly aware she was playing to the Sundance crowd. Still, the fact that Reynolds marks this as a “small wonder” provides wonder enough to watch. And pondering television, this film pointed me back to another series that perfectly balanced the challenges of youth with the realities of adult responsibility. Though the second season’s been a total bust, I was reminded of the exceptional first season of “Friday Night Lights” and all the wonderful notes it gracefully balanced for twenty-plus episodes.
i’m afraid michael clayton is in fact professionally made pablum.
Come down from your mountain and explain the grand dismissal.
I certainly wouldn’t dismiss ‘Michael Clayton’ but I didn’t think it as fine as you did, Mike. There is certainly some nice dialogue early on, and I liked the fact that so much of the backstory (Clayton’s marriage, the mob, the brother, Timmy) is either unexplained or given to us in little pieces. The movie treats its viewers as grown-ups, letting us figure out the Clayton character ourselves rather than imposing an interpretation on us.
But it did seem very conventional: a well-acted, somewhat self-important John Grisham. Clooney plays himself, for the most part. The Swinton character is interesting in that the movie emphasizes her insecurities (she sweats, she practices her lines ahead of time, she is reluctant to order murder), but I’m not sure the movie knows how to use her. How are her insecurities relevant to the way the plot unfolds? And her flustered, speechless final scene was very disappointing.
My favorite part was the scene of Clooney in the back of the taxi as the credits roll: the camera just lingers on his face and an astonishing range of emotions pass over it. It is not Oscar-worthy in a year that has Day-Lewis, Bardem and Downey Jr., but it is good.
By the way, I recently watched, in the space of a weekend, ‘There Will be Blood’ (for the first time), and ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘Zodiac’ (both for the second time). I have to say, nothing came close for me in 2007 to those three movies. I was going to write up a top 5 or top 10 list, but the drop-off after those three is so great, that it didn’t seem right to try.
I think your take is the same as mine, Chris–it’s in league with… well, I have never read/seen a good Grisham, so maybe I’d compare it to The China Syndrome, stuff like that. I think Swinton and Wilkinson both make of these potentially showy but boilerplate roles something more knotty and discomforting. (I agree that, ultimately, she’s a victim of simplistic plot demands, but the whole film takes that slick-lawyer morality play and builds a subtext of personal loss and insecurity and confusion that is better than your average bear.) A similar complexity can be seen the writing early on and the decision to roll credits with that taxi shot… Maybe my comparison would be to some of the great ‘fifties B pictures, Robert Wise’s Odd Man Out, Anthony Mann’s westerns. Genre pictures, not generic pictures.
Yeah, I think what I loved was that, like a range of other really damn good genre films (Eastern Promises, Bourne Ultimatum, The Mist, 28 Weeks Later) there’s a level of competence manifested in the production and assumed in the audience. While I agree that the troika you named is on another plane, it’s a great year when we can at the next “level” list so many films that are simply damn good at what they do.
my response is more or less of a piece with chris’ second paragraph.
i didn’t like the handling of the swinton character at all. she is the one female character we encounter who is not either in a domestic setting (the clayton women) or an object of male desire (anna). her inability to hold it together contrasted for me very strongly with the slick professionalism of clayton and the other pros, but the film didn’t do anything interesting with that contrast. even tom wilkinson’s character who cracks up is more in control than her. this is a film finally about being a pro–about holding it together even as your world shifts around you. swinton doesn’t belong in that world it seems. okay, but how exactly did she get to be top legal shark at a brutal corporation with those failings?
the wilkinson/anna sub-plot was ludicrous. why the hell did he have to be in love with her? and what was the point of the clayton restaurant sub-plot? just to jerk us around for 90 minutes with the possibility that the bomb was set by the mob and not unorth’s hoods? and, of course, the drunken brother has to be rehabilitated at the end.
watching this i was reminded of network but not in a good way.
Okay, gotcha. Disagree, but that’s a given.
michael clayton left me cold, but stephanie daley is every bit as delicious as mike describes it. the two women protagonists are wonderful, but what really grabbed me was the riffing and complicating the film does on the theme of motherhood. which leads me to make another plug for the canadian marion bridge, also about the endless complications of motherhood. in both movies, the mothers are very much alone, i.e. male-less. true, in stephanie daley there is timothy hutton (nice performance), but he’s there just to indicate that he’s not there. the tilda swinton character is portrayed as just about as alone as a woman who’s expecting a baby and who holds a job can be. her aloneness, in other words, is all inside, not least in the terrible ambivalence she feels towards this baby who may or may not betray her the way its miscarried sibling did. add to this the terrible guilt both swinton and hutton feel over the loss of their previous baby, and the awkward non-way in which they dealt with it, and you have a classic portrayal of unshared couple grief that drives a couple apart instead of making it closer.
when the now-quite-pregnant swinton engages in her finding sessions with the movie’s eponymous heroine, this ambivalence is re-enacted. on the one hand, she acts like a therapist, i.e. gently and probingly and sweetly. on the other, she works for the prosecution, so her job is not to treat stephanie but to find out how aware she was of her pregnancy and whether she can be charged with murder or not. at the same time, obviously, we understand that swinton has quite a messy knot of feelings with respect to snuffed babies, although i thought the film was wise in not hammering on that at all, but letting us guess it.
since stephanie’s parents exit quite soon (one of them literally, the other by falling into the background), swinton acts as a shadowy mother to young stephanie, whose life before the fact, we discover, was not a little troubled. these mirroring motherhoods (the physical ones, stephanie’s and swinton’s, and the therapeutic one, between swinton and stephanie) seemed to me to work quite powerfully. the aloneness of both women is highlighted rather than diminished by their frequent meetings (which are being videotaped for the court), in which they sit in straight-backed chairs in the middle of an elegant and functional but not exactly warm office. as their conversations proceed and more and more light is shed on what happened, you realize that their mutual acceptance, the acceptance of each other as failed mothers, might hold the key to their capacity to survive both their losses and their future motherhood.
so yeah, good movie. thanks mike for steering me towards it.
That’s a great post; your point about the betrayal of miscarriage is so acute it re-opens some things I’d been left puzzling. (You made me like the film even more.)