Review of Michael Clayton

0 stars

The critical acclaim for 2007’s Michael Clayton was deafening. Roger Ebert and the usual suspects maxed out the stars. Oscar nominations including Best Picture followed. 15 years later the film, like so many of this type, is all but forgotten. Forgive me for dredging it up, but some critical justice is due.

One hopes, going in, that the inevitable heavy-handed “message” will be made palatable through a compelling plot. Michael Clayton fails spectacularly in this regard, most notably by opening with a car bombing from the third act, in an apparent bid to intrigue us through the drudgery of first and second acts. Not only doesn’t it work - it enables even barely conscious viewers to gauge the entire plot from about midway. Worse, the climax, consisting of suspense over when/if this car bomb will go off, is made entirely moot. Clearly this narrative restructuring was a post-production attempt to please disaffected focus groups. I imagine fawning reviews of the time found ways to justify this trickery as a post-modern fuck you to colonialist 3-act structure.

When your message is overbearing and your plot an unsalvageable mess, you must rely on interesting characters. And this, I guess, is why this film made money. George Clooney (in the title role) has a natural charisma, even when called upon to play a hapless cog in the evil capitalist machine. He isn’t a great actor, reliant instead on good looks, a general glibness, and signature jerky head movements which seem to indicate deep emotion. Women want to have sex with him. Men want to have a drink with him. Or at least they did back in 2007.

I doubt anyone paid to see Tilda Swinton, who regardless won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role as lawyer for the evil company. Her Karen Crowder spends each night practicing everything she might say in meetings tomorrow in order to keep her natural giggling psychopathy repressed. She is literally insane. Anthropologically, she is a fascinating example of how Hollywood might imagine a typical businessman gets through their villainous life. And as such, of course Swinton got the Oscar. But schizo characters from a paranoid Oliver Stone fantasy are jarring here in post-Bourne gravitas realpolitik gritty-ville.

Also jarring is the character of Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the impending whistleblower who has only now realized that he’s spent his life fighting for murderous villains. In another ill-advised bid to generate interest in the first act, Arthur (a 60 year old man) decides to strip naked at a meeting and declare his love for a young girl who is part of the class-action lawsuit he is tasked with putting down. I’m not sure the filmmakers are self-aware enough to know how pedophiliac this appears, or if they hope to mystify us into not guessing how evil the company is, as we scratch our heads over how much of a pedo this guy might be. This love angle between old man and teenage girl is strangely woven through the entire film. Is 60-year old writer/director Tony Gilroy letting us in a bit of personal psychology? Probably.

We can evaluate this film as terrible on any grounds, but Michael Clayton is truly pernicious in its message.

Fictional agricultural conglomerate “U-North” stands in for Monsanto as the villain and “Culcitate” replaces actual herbicide Roundup, but make no mistake: Monsanto and Roundup are the thematic targets here. The filmmakers were lauded for pulling back the curtain on a Monsanto-esque legal battle at a time when it was fashionable (and lucrative) to claim Roundup was killing people.

These claims are not only false, but the opposite is true: Roundup (now available as generic glyphosate and thus no longer of any interest to class-action lawyers or Hollywood) is the greatest weed-killer ever designed, having saved incalculable labor and allowing farming and gardening to people otherwise unable to tackle the problem of rampant weeds overtaking and destroying their crops. Roundup does not cause cancer in humans and does not leech into the surrounding soil. It is an amazing invention that you see applied all around you, every day, from your neighbors garden to rows of corn along rural roads. It has drastically reduced the price and improved the quality of the food you eat.

A nuanced approach to the “Monsanto sucks” message would have the evil company at least make a pretense of justifying itself on the grounds I outline above. But in Tony Gilroy’s clown world, everyone from the top down is either aware they’re working for Hitler or making a career of evading the fact, and if they get any pangs of conscience there’s a corporate hit squad waiting to blow their car up in the first act. As further insult, this disgusting libel of all the good people who worked at Monsanto is wrapped up in a veneer of gritty stylistic realism, as if old Tony Gilroy is daring to let us in on what’s really going on, not forcing hateful propaganda down our throats.