George Clooney (36 page)

There is an explicit link between Clayton's son, Henry, and Arthur as we overhear a strange, illicit nighttime phone call, where the two seem to connect at a philosophical level. Arthur is a pseudo-father figure here, listening in a way that Michael was not earlier in the car when the boy tried to tell him about the book. Arthur is an avid listener. The key point here is the aspect of the game in which a group of characters are drawn to a place “as if they've been summoned” because they have experienced a shared dream (of which they are unaware). This is the force drawing Michael to the field, that he shares the dream of Arthur, of a fairer, more just society, and thereby rejects the life and the lifestyle he has led up to this point. Arthur later uses the term “summoned” to Michael in the hotel room, attempting to explain what he has learned from the boy's book. Whether left deliberately for Michael to find in Arthur's flat or not, the book contains the receipt for the copies of the incriminating memo and the picture of the horses.

Like the lingering shots of Clooney as Bob walking toward the camera in
Syriana
, we have a lengthy shot of Michael walking through his empty work environment, carrying his own bags to a plane with apparently no other passengers. He is a principled individual, framed alone, battling institutional forces of corruption, but is also part of that system. In terms of dress, he seems to be dominated by dark, sober colors that give him almost a funereal air. Crowder is also framed alone (at the gym, in an elevator, and entering a building) but she cannot connect with people like Michael does. He can also be a very charming people person, as when on the phone instructing his young legal team in Milwaukee succinctly but sensitively. He passes an envelope to the man who has been looking after Arthur, offering him tickets to a game if he is ever in New York. He knows how to make low-level corruption and diplomacy work in a spontaneous and interactive way, which we never see Crowder manage.

Gilroy's script links a number of elements. Some are obvious, like the boy's description of a game in which you can be talking to someone who turns out to be your “mortal enemy,” which Michael notes “sounds
familiar” but is exemplified in the apparently friendly knock at Arthur's door later. Other links are a little more subtle. Clayton's son sarcastically informs his mother that he has had breakfast even though there are no waffles with “It's a miracle” (like his father, he is something of a charming “miracle worker”). In the game, “all the people are hiding in the woods to try and stay alive,” which will be Michael's fate shortly after his car explodes. Michael sees the boy off to school with the order to “teach these people something,” but the boy does actually have knowledge, which first Arthur values and implicitly Michael comes to understand, if not at the level of conscious comprehension. The man to whom Michael owes money refers to an alcoholic wife as being “like strapped to a bomb” (reminding us of Michael's car). Clayton describes Arthur as “a killer” in the sense of possessing a brilliant legal mind but he will fall victim to unscrupulous men for whom this term is literally true.

Given Michael's clear expertise (demonstrated in the hit-and-run sequence) and the fact that he is in such demand (on call at any time of night), it seems strange that he is in such a financial position. His strained personal and family life and his disastrous restaurant investment all build pressure on him, but the main problem is the lack of precise professional identity, coupled to his effectiveness for an abusive system. When Marty (Sydney Pollack) explains later that he has created a niche, it should be one, given the logic of the system he is in, that pays well. The idea that someone who solves problems for others so well should be fallible in their personal life is a cliché of the detective genre, but that they should be so financially exposed seems unlikely. Gambling is a symptom of his unease with his life rather than the explicit cause of it. The roles that he plays in his job, charming health workers around Arthur, frightening Mr. Greer with facts about police procedure, or holding the phone away from his head for a second while he says he will fetch a pen (although he is already holding one)—all these are just part of his everyday life. Like Miles Massey he is dealing with super-rich clients, but unlike Massey here, as he says to Mr. Greer, there is “no play here, no angle, no champagne room.” The stakes are real.

Michael's brother, Timmy (David Lansbury), is an alcoholic who has wrecked the early life of his son but who Michael eventually comes back to as a source of help after he has been supposedly killed by the bomb. His older brother, Gene (Sean Cullen), helps with the final sting operation on Crowder and his final words to Michael, “stay close,” underline that family ultimately comes through. Gene underscores Michael's confused identity, in which “all these cops think you're a lawyer” while “all these
lawyers thinking you're some kind of cop.” He concludes with “You know exactly what you are” but that may not be entirely true.

The security of Michael's whole position relies on superior knowledge. This also means people keep their distance and also underlines his weakness when a lack of knowledge arises (over the impending merger for example). He is not losing his touch but he was never part of an inner circle to be kept abreast of changes. A deleted scene would have shown us a postcoital chat with Brini Glass (Jennifer Ehle), which shows how important he is to the company but would also underline weakness in Michael, in a relationship that is not really more than a stopgap and in which he parades his knowledge about a client (something he never does in the finished film).

The film is full of lengthy two-shots, mostly involving Michael, where actors deliver meaty dialogue in powerful exchanges, interspersed with wider shots or slower panning or rotating movements, such as Arthur and Michael in the cell or later in the alley. In the cell, Gilroy holds the shot on Michael as Arthur rambles on, the anger building as Michael is repeatedly interrupted. His anxious glances outside might convey fear that they are overheard or that their time together will be used up before he has had a chance to speak. When he does get a chance, we realize the frustration is due to Arthur coming off medication, something he had promised not to do. In the alleyway, we have a clear demonstration that “it's not just madness” as Arthur had scrawled on the wall before leaping out of his hotel window. Arthur says he has needed time “to gather my thoughts,” to which Michael asks, “How's that going?” We may have a man acting irrationally, carrying a bag with far too many baguettes for one person to eat, but at a moment's notice he demonstrates precise knowledge of the law relating to mental health in the state of New York. It is a good example of an exchange with the minimum of intrusive camerawork, just two great actors delivering powerful lines.

Arthur's speech about the culpability of U-North bleeds across shots of the killers listening in after tapping his phone, and his comment “the last place you want to see me is in court” ironically seals his fate, so that this speech constitutes his summary to a jury we never get to hear. The brutal murder of Arthur, from the knock on the door to his final heartbeat, is all one take, with just a slow zoom in to his foot to show the lethal injection in more detail and only a couple of whispered instructions between the men. With a single hand-held camera we follow the administering of an electric shock at the door, to something being put in Arthur's mouth, to his being carried into the bathroom, to the injection and his pulse taken twice: all within 90 seconds. The killers, Verne and Iker, are described
in the script as “flooding in … like machines” in a bizarre mix of the solicitous (catching Arthur as he falls, carrying him quickly and efficiently, wearing gloves, surgical boots, and even hairnets) and the murderous, with a final irony in the comment, “We're good.”
³

After Michael's brief sight of Timmy, Gilroy initially uses a backseat camera position (a little like that used by Soderbergh for the jeep ride in
The Good German
) with the two passengers, Michael and Henry, in the dead space of the frame. Gilroy shows Michael in close-up, chewing, giving a slight shake of the head as if anger is building up, which eventually bursts out and he pulls over to talk. For all the rhetoric and all the bluster, however, there is an underlying desperation to his assertion that Henry is tougher than Timmy, and the statement “that's not how it's gonna be for you” seems more his worry than the boy's, who just looks back at him bemused. Michael's marriage may have failed, he may not listen closely to the boy's prattle in the car or look at the book he had been given, but he is passionate that his son should have a better life. Michael is only just holding on here. His hug of Marty at the unofficial wake in the bar that follows is held slightly longer than Marty expects, and his repetition “I know it” underlines that he does not know anything anymore and the death of Arthur is a real shock.

The narrative structure, rerunning the section from the gambling den onward, suggests that we, like Clayton, do not know as much about the world around us as we think. Now, we glimpse the man just getting away from the car in time to plant the bomb, we realize why the SAT-NAV does not function properly, and we understand that the stress of Crowder at this point is less connected with speech than with her second assassination, this one very overt. Michael's subsequent appearance to Crowder, a dead man inexplicably resurfacing, has elements of a ghostly visitation and of Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral.

However, he does not walk into the arms of his brother but past him, away from the life he knows but toward what, we can only guess. If his knowledge-based role had set him apart from his colleagues, to have sabotaged even that role leaves him completely isolated, even if morally vindicated. His mournful expression here also contains anger and frustration, seeming closer to breaking down in a way far more justified than
Solaris
or
Syriana
. Like his speeding away from Greer's house, he declares to his brother to whom he hands the phone, “I need some air.”

The final shot, a nice way to encourage cinema audiences to stay in their seats and read the credits, and our last view of Michael, is not akin to the fist-thumping elevation of a
Rocky
-style narrative; we are not
celebrating the victory of the underdog. Rather we are closer to the end of
The Long Good Friday
(John Mackenzie, 1980), where gangland boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is shown also in the backseat of a car, albeit at gunpoint, and we see a similar range of emotions (self-loathing, resignation, and grief) pass over his face and do not need to see the end of either journey to realize that both men are, to some extent, broken. Clayton has been brought to the realization articulated by Arthur at the beginning. He has become Arthur's heir, “Shiva, the god of death,” bringing down two of the most immoral figures that he works with but many, and the system that produced and supported them, still remain. He has betrayed the company that just lent him $80,000, which they will no doubt want back, the basis of his trade (trust) may be lost by his openly acting as a whistle-blower, and there is no clear sign of how he can function professionally as he is still caught between the legal and criminal worlds, fitting securely in neither. His instruction to the driver (an uncredited vocal contribution by Gilroy himself) to just drive suggests this aimlessness.

Michael Clayton has a slight feel of conspiracy theories like Alan J. Pakula's
The Parallax View
(1974), in its depiction of faceless corruption and a willingness to kill anyone to maintain economic (and political) power. In
Michael Clayton
, it is not a matter of a corporation having to seek out alternative criminal worlds for the assassins. We see Verne and Iker at the golf course, sporting U-North logos on their bags. They are the company. On the film poster, the
X-Files
-style slogan (“The truth can be adjusted”) is more central and in larger font than the title of the movie itself and placed over a slightly blurred image of Michael.

Clooney originally rejected the role, deterred by Gilroy as a first-time director, but the status of the producers here (Soderbergh, Pollack, and Anthony Minghella) is very impressive, reflecting the strength of their belief in Gilroy's script and his ability to realize it on-screen.

Legendary scriptwriter William Goldman described Clooney as “giving the performance of his career,” and certainly there is a strongly mournful, elegiac quality to the film, largely implicit in Michael's character and brought out in Clooney's delivery of it.
⁴
As a fixer, he solves people's problems, taking their guilt away, a role performed by priests in former times. As Arthur says to him about the “burden” such work creates, he is a social purger of sins, a role that takes a toll on his own soul in the carrying of knowledge about the sins of others. The role works only if he keeps this knowledge and does not pass it on, but to keep it exacts a heavy price, etched on his careworn features.

Keeler: It is like entering a different time zone. You're an outsider, isolating yourself. You're condemned … You have become mere sadness and live in a different state of mind.

—
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

The opening prologue in Sweden sets the stylistic markers found in the body of the film. Our first sight of Jack (George Clooney) shows him sitting forward, unsmiling, drinking whisky, next to a naked girl, Ingrid (Irina Björklund). It may be a theoretically romantic cliché with an isolated situation, a log cabin, and a roaring fire, but Jack's look of melancholy and need for tense shoulders to be massaged suggest he is not at ease. Handheld, shaky point-of-view shots, like the slow tracking shot toward the cabin, suggest the presence of a would-be assassin but there is no attack on them at this point (denying us an action-based opening such as in
The Spy Who Loved Me
, Lewis Gilbert, 1977). Similarly, as Jack subsequently outsmarts the second killer, circling behind him, we have a point-of-view shot from behind the car but this is not immediately followed by Jack's surprise attack. We are denied viewing positions that can be easily identified simply with an antithetical force, creating a sense of unease from the outset. The editing pace is leisurely, almost ponderous (Jack is held in shot, motionless, staring out from the car ferry for 10 seconds), action scenes are shown in long or extreme long shot (there is no cutting to close-ups for dramatic effect), and there is little or no use of a soundtrack to heighten the drama of physical action.