From The Atlantic
There's a great (short) analysis of Michael Clayton on the Atlantic. It's a good read. Here's an excerpt:
I realize I haven't watched this movie since it came out. I know what I'll do this week.
There's a great (short) analysis of Michael Clayton on the Atlantic. It's a good read. Here's an excerpt:
One of the disorientations of where we're at—the obliterative sucking splotch of a present tense in which we now all live—is that it feels simultaneously like a malign mischance and like something we should have seen coming a mile off. For decades the poets have been sobbing, the screenwriters having nightmares, and the canaries in the coal mine toppling stoically from their perches. Works of art that seemed, at the time, to be merely broody or frazzled now appear darkly predictive—pregnant with prophecy, some of them. All the signs point to here. So how to mark this rather subterranean anniversary, 10 years after the release of a very, very good movie? Perhaps by saying that it is becoming a classic before our eyes, because things are even more Michael Clayton now than they were when Michael Clayton first came out.
Want Trumptown 2017, a grinning Babylon of grift, pelf, and payola, with everybody mortgaged to everybody, and everything else—marriages, bank accounts, moral systems, nervous systems, reasons for living—burned out? Here it is. Recall if you will George Clooney, in the titular role, driving too fast on predawn country roads. His face is heavy, so heavy. Existence is choking him. Despair is on his tongue and in the black basins of his Clooney eyes. He looks like a man who woke up depressed, in that state (you know that state) where every thought has a dripping, downward-dragging tendency. In fact, he hasn't slept at all. Abruptly he pulls over, climbs out of his Mercedes, and sets off up a grassy hillside, slightly dizzy-looking in his flapping shroud of a dark corporate suit, as if in the wake of a catastrophe … How did he—how did we—get here?
In the city, anxiety reigns, debt stacked upon debt. The restaurant/bar that Clayton owned with his brother Timmy has gone belly-up—as has Timmy, an addict—and a loan shark wants $75,000 from him, today. Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is teeter-tottering on the edge of a huge merger. Out in the heartland, meanwhile, milking its cows and getting cancer, subsists that other American population: the perpetually screwed. Kenner, Bach & Ledeen has been defending the agri-monster U/North, producer of a weed killer that also—less efficiently, but no less finally—kills human beings, in a class-action suit brought on behalf of many poisoned, ailing, and bereaved rural families. Tilda Swinton plays Karen Crowder, U/North's in-house counsel: ultra-accomplished, merciless, shallow-breathing, at an agonizing pitch of tension. Her head swivels in birdlike terror.
And now Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), the firm's lead attorney on the U/North case, has gone rogue. Gone bananas. He's off his meds. He's high on the truth. Illumined by mania, gnashing with conviction, he sees it all:
I realized, Michael, that I had emerged not through the doors of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the, the, the, the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.
I realize I haven't watched this movie since it came out. I know what I'll do this week.
