Michael Clayton

    Slickly packaged and produced legal thriller with a very satisfying payoff. It’s handsome visually (the NYC shots as well as the countryside vistas are photographed beautifully), and the score helps tie your stomach in knots. The plot is not so complex that you get distracted trying to keep details straight. We’ve seen this story told many times in similar legal thrillers, but you never really get that till after the credits roll and …after a few beats, you think…wait, I’ve seen this before, right?

Two things help this movie seem better than it really is: Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson. Both play powerful, hard-nosed lawyers representing huge, impersonal corporations (Wilkinson is the biggest of bigwigs at Huge Big City Law Firm, and Swinton is head legal counsel for Mean, Bad, Soul-Less Chemical Company). Both fall apart spectacularly.

Wilkinson does so following a moment of clarity during which he sees how twisted and wrong his entire life’s pursuit has been, and lays the groundwork for a massive, expensive, public mea culpa. Wilkinson captures his shaky zeal, his disheveled, child-like wonder at his new-found vision, his crafty enthusiasm as he shakes off his co-worker’s (Michale Clayton — employed by the firm to clean up just such messes as Wilkinson represents) desperate efforts to contain him. Swinton does not so much fall apart at she implodes. Her tenuous hold on her composure slips and her own icy carapace cracks as she wades deeper and deeper into shit. She becomes a high-pitched, twitching mess. The entire scene on the phone with the cool, efficient hitman she plans to employ is intensely uncomfortable. Overly polite, halting, falsely bright and casual — it is so very apparent that she’s sickeningly out of her league but out of control.

Good movie. Not great. The fact that everyone fell all over each other to kiss this movie’s ass tells me that maybe there is just such a quagmire of shitty movies out there, that even the B/B+ ones seem like God’s Gift to Cinema.