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.

Study Abroad

"In addition to accumulating sexual partners, binge drinking, drug use and learning, white people consider studying abroad to be one of the most important parts of a well rounded college education."

Go totally B & T

I grew up in the West, home of wide-open spaces, orange groves and concrete jungles. What enchanted me most about New York was its verticality—the way everything was stacked up, layer upon layer, the stories of a family friend who described his relatives making pasta in tiny Little Italy tenements by stretching the dough across starched white sheets. Everywhere you looked—and places where you didn’t—there was so much history.

My first few years in New York, I got to see the city as a member of various film crews, fanning out from Queens to Brighton Beach to the Village, everywhere searching for the perfect location to capture the malaise of a perpetual grad student, an inspiring sunrise, or a scary dark alley. In my mind, I could never stray from the deep canyons of lower Manhattan, where I hoofed it from river to river, hardly ever taking the subway or cab. That is, until I got a film job at the St. Augustine Church on Sixth Avenue in Brooklyn.

I’d never been so enchanted before; this landmark block of leafy trees and row houses, towering spires in the distance, and the sound of the church bells filtering down. So when, two or three years, I had an opportunity to move into this totally ramshackle brownsone shared with two other women, three men and a child, just a few doors down from the magnificent St. Augustine with her beautiful spires, I took it as a sign. Except I didn’t, not exactly. For this, I would have to leave the vertical density of the city and accept a different kind of life in Brooklyn.

Certainly, if I had secret hippie proclivities, if I enjoyed strumming a guitar over vegetarian goulash, practicing free love, or not having to shave my legs, it might have come more naturally to me, this quasi-commune thing. It would be easier to explain, at least.

The church bells rang each day, the sound filtering through the house, four floors of hardwood, huge closets, sturdy banisters. Where we might intersect in the shared kitchen, impromptu dinner parties or late-night poker games where we wrapped ourselves in blankets to combat the cold. We’d play host to people passing through, musicians, radical puppeteers, organic farmers. This was a big change for me, the space, the camaraderie, the compromise. But as I adapted to life amongst so many others, I learned to make it work, coming out on the other side, a different sort of person.

Harness the digital video frontier

Found this site that aspires to be "free resource for content creators that will become a user contributed repository of information." It got me to thinking, what's so great about words, anyway?

A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing

The good news is -- you're fired. The bad news is you've got, all you got, just one week to regain your jobs, starting tonight. Starting with tonights sit. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this months sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize's a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. You get the picture? You're laughing now?

Find a more lucrative career

A no-frills guide to doing stand-up.

write poetry

Rockets Red

Where we were when the bomb hit:
Left field bleachers,
Orioles at Yankees,
seventh inning stretch.
Imagine our surprise when
mid-verse into the National Anthem
the sky lit up with poisonous
green, and the automatic organ
with some other occasion in mind
continued its festive trill.

Next day, a helicopter in my neighborhood
hovered low,
dispersing pamphlets, tablets,
useful tips. Of course the sound sent
screaming figures scattering like ants.
You had to get close enough to
get your nourishment from
the beak of the dipped bird.
See that it only said:
U.S. Government Relief.

Last time, lights out
from Toronto to the Midwest,
I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge
with a regal refugee named Hatshetsup.
She claimed she was a CBS news exec,
but I know an Egyptian queen when I see one.
Time before last,
I slogged through the smoke
downtown, checkpoints and photographs,
listened to music I hadn’t heard for years.
Called friends to hear how they were doing
over and over: did you see? And: can you believe?

End of the world or no,
it’s getting very difficult
to write with all these people running around.
But there’s always a bright side—
tonight, I’ll be the one cracking a beer
offering melting ice cream to neighbors.
Call me a role model in these
uncertain times. Call me
an old hand
because by now I know
better than to look for the stars
when everything goes dark.