julioecolon

There is a quiet energy about the film, Michael Clayton, that serves to heighten our growing sense of the evil, predatory practices of UNorth, a New York law firm specializing in litigation, where the eponymous lead character is employed as a niche attorney who cleans up legal snafus. For the past six years, UNorth has been battling a no-holds barred class action lawsuit by plaintiffs who suffered contamination or death from a pesticide manufactured at a company whose president is also a UNorth shareholder. Just as the UNorth team are on the point of prevailing in their counter-suit, in which they claim that no lab evidence contraindicated use of the pesticide at the time it was marketed, their lead attorney discovers a company document, long suppressed: it is a detailed laboratory analysis of the pesticide, conducted before the pesticide's dangers became public knowledge. Its authors concluded that the chemical substance would likely cause tissue damage if ingested even in minute quantities. Worse yet, the document bears the signature of its company's president. The problems escalate from there: the lead attorney's mental state begins to unravel just as UNorth is on the point of clinching an important merger that will make it a world leader in legal affairs. Michael Clayton is called in to staunch the flow. By so doing, he places himself at the center of a dangerous and deadly game. Tony Gilroy's direction is deftly handled, and it's not hard to imagine his conceiving beforehand of the tone and quality of this film as something imbued with a beautiful, diaphanous light throughout. But, it's especially the quiet calmness he must have urged on his actors that is the most notable and successful and which adds a special quality to this film that sets it apart from the typical thriller by staging even the most murderous plotting in the context of the uneventful quotidian, with the morning light filtering down. George Clooney is especially good in the guise of the divorced, burned-out ex-cop turned burned- out lawyer, who is now a financially over-extended gambling addict, and he delivers his lines with a remarkably quiet, steely reserve. Tilda Swinton delivers a carefully nuanced role as a lawyer of modest background, unremarkable educational pedigree, and average looks, who has now risen to great heights despite these impediments and thanks to her unbridled, immoral ambitions, but who is nonetheless never quite able to shake herself of the belief that getting your dowdy business clothes ready the night before, rehearsing your lines, and disposing permanently of human obstacles are three sure-fire ways to succeed. One has a sense of the many backs, including those of her lower-class family, that she stepped on to get to the position she has now attained and, if nothing else, her role should serve as a warning to all the young bucks out there now contemplating careers as attorneys and salivating at the financial gains they stand to make. I am less happy with Tom Wilkinson's performance as the lead attorney on the brink of insanity. His delivery is just a little too over the top and thus irritating. Had he toned down the King Lear-like ravings just a bit, his delivery would have aligned itself more productively with the quiet deliveries of the other actors and made of this film the perfect thriller. Although I'm no George Clooney fan, this is a film worth watching.

There are many things that are redeemable about this film, but there are some flies in the ointment, as well. Let's start with what is not so good: The screenplay, which is hugely uneven, and has Juno and Leah spouting off one round after another of conceited but hugely clever, sixteen-year-old assessments of the world, in ways that no sixteen-year-old I have ever been around is able to do. Most sixteen-year-olds are anxious to sound adult, but what usually comes out of their mouths are carefully rehearsed, oft-repeated catch phrases that make the utterer sound and seem irretrievably stupid. Some of the quirkiness (and therefore attractiveness) in Juno has to do with her individuality, but she doesn't sound too terribly original when she insists that Iggy Pop made the best music that ever was (this sounds like something a teenager desperate to be different might have read and latched onto in Rolling Stone magazine), nor does she strike one as all that cool when she is shown with a cheeseburger phone that would certainly have seemed more fitting in the hands of a five-year-old. Worse yet, she decides to seduce the school dweeb, Bleeker, a boy with very little going for him except for his genetically inherited propensity for study and quietude. Unfortunately, the resolution in the film concerning Juno's relationship with Bleeker is far from satisfactory and left me wondering if I had just been to Disney. Juno's parents aren't nearly as upset as one would expect when she reveals the rather tawdry consequences of her seduction to them; but it's the heroic gesture made by Juno, to find good, loving parents for her soon-to-be-born child, that is the most muddled in this film. We are shown the characteristic suburban homes in the neighborhoods of the nouveau-riche (where the adoptive parents reside), all cookie-cutter in design and therefore lacking in originality; and I do believe that we are meant at first to dislike the adoptive mother, who comes off looking like a control freak who has stifled the last remnants of love out of a childless marriage. But then the screenwriter makes a U-turn and suddenly this woman is the victim, and the baby hers to keep, despite the break-up of the loveless marriage and the departure of the ex-husband for way cooler digs, a loft in the city. The screenwriter was at pains to show the class differences between Juno's parents and the adoptive parents, but he fumbles the ball by putting all the foul language in Juno's step-mother's mouth and by showing her out to be a hoyden most likely to take umbrage if you cross your eyes at her step-daughter: the tirade she engages in against the technician at the hospital, for example, is pointless. If it's meant to show the white working-class animus toward Hispanics, it doesn't quite work. And, it sounds terribly contrived, at the end, when Juno admits, as she's lying in her hospital bed with the dweeb, that the baby had never been her own from the start and had always really belonged to the adoptive mother. Good things about this movie: the performances of Alison Janney and J.K. Simmons, who were given precious little to work with, but who manage, just the same, to give the film some backbone; Jason Bateman's scenes with Juno are marvelously delivered. Ellen Page, on the other hand, needed to tone down the staccato rhythm of her interjections and give her character breathing room.

I passed this film up on several trips to Blockbuster because I disliked the title and didn't care much for the photo on the DVD box. But, Blockbuster showcases so much crap, and I had basically exhausted all of my viewing choices when I finally settled on this DVD. To my great surprise, this is a fascinating movie, with just enough twists and turns to keep the viewer interested. Toni Colette is wonderful and believable in the role of a forensic psychologist tasked with interviewing a murder suspect. Her job: to weave together the fragments of his harrowing narrative in order to ascertain his culpability, which the impetuous arresting officer (he has testosterone seeping out of his pores) is eager to have confirmed. The film is brilliant because it pitches together a smart forensic psychologist who eventually has to pull her dusty textbooks off the shelf to read up on Gestalt, with a young man of remarkable, quiet brilliance and the cunning of a fox at the chicken coop. Well worth viewing.