Classic Movie Review : Michael Clayton (2007)
Thrillers are a unique beast for reviewers. Because you can’t really judge them by the standards you judge other narratives with. What happens in them needs to be equally important to who it happens to. An asymmetry that favours plot or characters is usually preferable, but not in this case. Thrillers need to have what I call emotional realism: a real-world plausibility that’ll let the audience swap place with the protagonist in their mind. But that protagonist needs to be strong enough to let them go back to just being an audience.
While Tony Gilroy’s legal thriller Michael Clayton is full of high-powered lawyers and conspiratorial backroom deals, it is one of the best examples of emotional realism I’ve seen.
The titular character of Michael Clayton (the immortal George Clooney) is a fixer for a big shot New York law firm. It’s never clear what is fully entails in the movie, but he’s handling problems ranging from a client committing a hit and run to a bipolar lawyer going off his meds and stripping naked inside a deposition room. The naked lawyer in question is Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) who is about to expose one of their biggest clients: an evil pesticide-peddling conglomerate that we’ll call “not Monsanto”.
The cornerstone of emotional realism
If Michael Clayton doesn’t come off as another cheap John Grisham ripoff, it’s because of its titular character. Michael Clayton is a nuanced, subtly shaded and, more important, interestingly flawed human being. In mainstream movies, characters like him bravely bear the weight of a loved one’s mistake. They take on their emotionally volatile sister’s drug debt or work off a dead relative’s bad karma with organized crime. This is different here. Clayton’s problem are similar, but not identical.
What makes Michael Clayton such an interesting character is that he is a strong-willed, intelligent man who worked an escape plan from the dark side of a legal business by opening a bar… with his alcoholic brother. I love that. The only reason why an intelligent person would take such a stupid fucking decision is family. That colours George Clooney’s character in a whole different light than every other lawyer-looking assholes in legal thrillers. Writer and director Tony Gilroy made us aware of his vulnerability.
It might seem like a stupid detail, but it informs how we receive the movie. Because this is not a good vs evil affair. Michael Clayton is on the wrong side of the moral scale and he’s not exactly willing to burn bridges to “do the right thing”. Because it’s not only his family that matters to him, but every close relationship like the one to his boss Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) or to Arthur Edens. Clayton wants his cake and eat it too and you can’t help but to root for him. Because we’d all love to do right by everyone.
Even if they don’t deserve it. That’s emotional realism for you.
There’s also realism realism in this movie
A legal thriller isn’t supposed to be realistic. It’s supposed to make you terrified of the justice system by showing you how pliable it is. There is some of that in Michael Clayton, but it’s not what the movie is about. It’s really a movie about finding a moral center in an amoral world where not every decision is easy to make. Another detail that makes Michael Clayton endearing is its understated nature. It goes above and beyond what it should do to anchor its reality with ours. Its implausibilities happen in a plausible way.
There’s a very famous scene in the movie where Clayton walks out of his car because there are horses on the side of the road. He’s burned out and looking for answers and his fucking car blows up while he’s in the field looking at the horses. The movie never comes back to it. Clayton doesn’t dream about the fucking horses. He doesn’t open a horse farm at the end. It’s just something that happened. Burned out people are bound to get out of their car and wander on the side of the road. That’s it.
Tony Gilroy doesn’t stop there. He gets painstakingly granular with realism. Another scene I love is when the counsel for “not Monsanto” Karen Crowder (the always awesome Tilda Swinton) repeats her lines for a media interview. Gilroy cuts it with the actual interview in order to show how much repetition goes into what sounds like fluid and natural answers. Instead of telling you institutions aren’t honest or spontaneous, he shows you. It’s not quite a visceral experience, but it is cerebrally satisfying.
*
Michael Clayton is both a gorgeously crafted and visually unspectacular movie. Both a legal thriller and an exploration of existential issues one can feel while working for the legal system. It has a delightful ambiguity about its true nature. I’m not the biggest legal thriller enthusiast in the world, but Tony Gilroy had obviously greater ambitions than just ripping off John Grisham. I’m not sure if I fully appreciated what this movie has to offer, but I think anyone would appreciate it to some degree.
