Chicago Film Festival: Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is the fall season's most interesting and rewarding contradiction. Overplotted, and guilty of repeating the same backward-looping structure that writer-director Tony Gilroy just pulled off with greater ingenuity in The Bourne Ultimatum, but nonetheless commanding in its shape and refreshingly alert to how a real person usually experiences one crisis within a web of other crises: professional, ethical, domestic, and introspective. Inconsistently acted, but never poorly acted, and graced with several distilled examples of truly inspired performance. Handsome in look and pristine in texture, even if the movie's elegant sheen affiliates it with the high-gloss corporate aesthetic that the rest of the film seems designed to interrogate, even to criminalize. Thematically diffuse, especially when we're asked to take such a debonair star as an emblem of modern disillusionment, and even more so when the broad diseases of a culture get repackaged at the conclusion into a duel between two paragons of Honesty and Deceit. Paradoxes abound all over Michael Clayton and impress themselves on every level of my response to it. And yet, say whatever else you will, such pervasive, inchoate dispersal of such mutually permeating anxieties has rarely been evoked so tautly at the center of a post-9/11 Hollywood movie, and the multiplex needs more movies where life, work, morality, and debt comprise the constellation of adult experience, unimpinged upon by concessions to youth audiences and unameliorated by any whiff of romance. Enigmas and imbalances of power persist. Sex remains the furthest thing from the movie's mind. Time-honored structures of narrative wobble, even if the wobbling betrays no truly radical inclinations. Even the audience-friendly finale affords plenty of room for the putative victor to sink back into doubt and impotence and for the villain, or the offstage cadre of villains, to sprout new hydra-heads and think of new survival tricks. Credit watchers, we few and proud, are rewarded by this movie, which isn't over until the final blackout cut, when the hero's name, spookily rendered in the serifed idiom of the corporate business card, doesn't grace or complement Michael's image but actually snuffs it out. Click here to read the rest...

Photo © 2007 Section Eight/Warner Bros. Pictures