Review Thursday: Michael Clayton

As a film school grad and someone who analyzed hundreds of scripts for Miramax for a couple of years at the beginning of the new millennium, I’m intimately familiar with iron-clad, unfailingly successful screenplay formula ala Syd Field and Robert McKee. After writing enough "reader reports" to stretch to the moon and back, the beats of three-act structure have become another coil in my DNA: you’ve got your inciting incident, a major reversal by page or minute 30, escalating complications through the middle sixty pages, then another all-bets-are-off bang at page 90 and then a resolution.

In practice, what you find are movies that loosely follow this template—they hit the ground running in the first 30 minutes or so, then flag with second act problems, throw in a third act twist that feels contrived, and them limp toward the finish. It’s a structure that’s so well-worn that we take it for granted. At the same time, it’s very exciting to see a film that breaks out of the conventional beats. I felt that way—excited—when I was watching Michael Clayton.

There was something invigorating about the way director Tony Gilroy approached the stuff of story in the film, and I don’t mean starting out with a car bomb and then having the rest of the movie be a flashback leading up to that moment. It’s the scenes themselves with their elliptical quality, their curious inertia that add up to a film with a power that seems to sneak up on you.

The movie drops you into scenes in the middle, which in itself is quite par for the course, quite cinematic. But where I think Michael Clayton departs from the usual model is that it approaches story information sidelong and asks the viewer to put the pieces together. Moving away from the three-act paradigm, it further refuses to explain overmuch, lay out the information the viewer wants to know, and is all the more involving for it. Michael Clayton casts the viewer as voyeur, and you can’t help but feel complicit as the pieces come together.

Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby called it a “screenwriter’s movie” but I have to say I disagree. I suppose that when a movie is talky or intelligent, it’s easy to say: “Oh, I bet the screenwriter had a great time with that,” but from my own experience in the process of development, I think the idea of a “screenwriter’s movie” is as dubious as saying: “that looks like a carpenter’s building.” That is changing somewhat with a level of cult of personality rising around screenwriters like Charlie Kaufman. As wretched as I thought it was, I guess Juno could be considered a “screenwriter’s movie.” At every minute, you’re aware of how “written” the movie is—because all of the contrived cleverness had so little respect for characters or story and was so hell-bent on screaming “look at how adorable I am.”

With Michael Clayton, the notion of whatever was on the page falls away. In my mind, therefore, Michael Clayton is an “auteur’s movie.” I doubt Michael Clayton read as well as it executed. That it comes to life in the spaces around words is a testament to the sometimes subtle contributions of the director. Supported by some powerhouse performance—Pollack, Clooney, Swinton, Wilkinson—Gilroy is manipulating the unsaid unlock totally new levels of depth in the story, which is truly cinematic.

There were definitely things that I disliked about Michael Clayton, important things. I wanted the hows and whys of the car bombing to remain elliptical like the rest of the movie, because when it was explained it turned out to be both conventional and far-fetched. I love Tom Wilkinson and thought his performance was brilliant, but as the moral center of the movie, he was hard to really invest in.

Ultimately, I’m kind of a sucker for corporate conspiracy movies. The Insider, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. They don’t sound sexy on paper, but they are a lens on the world a lot of us live in, showing up to a nondescript office every day, basically unconnected to real life. At their best, they can reveal the moral character of a human being tested in an usually tangible way. In its remarkably spare scenes, I feel like Michael Clayton opened up a truly unique view of those kind of quiet tests.