THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT?

Michael Clayton
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Cast: Tom Wilkinson (Arthur Edens), Sydney Pollack (Marty Bach), Tilda Swinton (Karen Crowder), George Clooney (Michael Clayton), Ken Howard (Don Jefferies), Frank Wood (Gerald), Sean Cullen (Det. Gene Clayton)

PLOT: Law firm “fixer” Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is assigned to locate and corral the wayward Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), his good friend, senior partner in the firm and a manic depressive. Arthur has gone off his medication with disastrous results for the firm’s biggest client, a sinister chemical firm fighting a billion-dollar lawsuit alleging environmental poisoning. Clayton soon finds himself surrounded by duplicitous colleagues and murderous henchman.

Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is the latest entrant in the category of Corporate Film Noir, joining Sidney Lumet’s still disturbing Network and Oliver Stone’s preachy and dated Wall Street. Clayton keeps its eyes myopically trained on a toxic juncture of money, power and murder. That single-minded vision gives Clayton its power to disquiet but also reveals its shortcoming – it’s not very entertaining, being mournful rather than suspenseful, didactic rather than playful. I watched Clayton two weeks ago and the feeling of regret it engendered stays with me, a power not every movie can boast of, but it’s not a movie I would watch again. It’s too joyless a piece of moviemaking for repeat viewing.

That joylessness was highlighted when I watched Brian DePalma’s hypnotic, exultantly cinematic Dressed to Kill for the fifth or sixth time shortly after seeing Clayton. Whether one thinks that Dressed is DePalma’s sick fantasy, his comment on society’s idea of women, an especially alarming gloss on the Hitchcock of Frenzy and Psycho, or an exercise in virtuoso filmmaking and audience manipulation, it is very provoking and entertaining. (How provoking it was on its original release is revealed by DePalma’s commentary on the DVD. He still smarts from some of the attacks made on him and his supposedly misogynistic movie.) DePalma revels in the basic stuff of filmmaking – the manipulation of image and sound. Clayton's director, Tony Gilroy, doesn't revel like DePalma and makes his points in Clayton without leaving room for argument or surprise. Greed and duplicity are bad, stick by your friends, and don’t lie: these are hardly exciting or provoking ideas.

The banality of Gilroy’s ideas would be less obvious if he indulged in some of the baser elements of film noir – sex and suspense. The lack of sex is a daring choice for Gilroy to make, but sex is a staple of the theatrical arts for a reason – it supplies natural tension. Clooney is, in Paris Hilton-speak, a Hottie (not a Nottie), and without a woman to flirt with his considerable charisma is unharmed but the audience is cheated of a basic thrill. Tilda Swinton (playing Crowder, the manipulative lawyer for the chemical firm) is a powerful presence but she and Clooney interact cursorily and without any hint of sex. For the rest of the movie Crowder is an androgynous corporate witch dressed in increasingly ugly outfits, the last of which is a woebegone, almost contemptuous schmatte a high-powered corporate lawyer would never wear, never mind own. By the end of the film Gilroy’s cursory plotting and his contempt for Crowder have made her pathetic, no challenge to Clooney. Their final showdown is not a seat-clenching duel between bloodthirsty equals but a prank on a stooge.

George Clooney is one of those intrinsically beatified actors, like Cary Grant or John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart, who it's difficult to kill off in a movie: the audience just isn’t going to buy it. So without a strong adversary for his character, and Crowder is hardly that, suspense is minimal. We expect Clooney will win – so what’s the big deal when he does? The two henchmen on his tail don't have names and are completely personality-free. Whether they live, die or succeed in killing Clooney isn't much of a concern for the viewer, and Crowder's motives are too obscure to either engage or repulse the audience.

The lack of suspense is offset by some considerable pleasures, chief among them Clooney's and Atkinson's performances. Clooney's is a subtle manipulation of his public persona. The sly grin is used as a disguise for self-contempt, the puppy-dog eyes are flirtatious yet pathetic, the handsomeness has artfully gone to seed. Atkinson's demented Arthur Evans is a delightfully showboating madman, almost a parody of one of The Snake Pit’s hammier denizens. All that keeps his performance from funny farm ludicrousness is a well-judged decision not to froth at the mouth. Atkinson's daring staginess really connects with the audience, and Evans's death is very disturbing. Another asset is Gilroy's fine feeling for atmosphere. The gritty set design and the cinematography, which makes even expensive interiors look dirty, add a great deal to the film.

My touchstone for film noir is John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, whose concision of plot and character are a reproach to Michael Clayton's sloppiness. Every character in Falcon has a name and at least one very strong motive (unlike Clayton's almost superfluous henchmen) and it is the combustion of those characters that makes Falcon eternally, iconically enjoyable. Clayton is a fine movie, but a twistier plot and more attention to the details of characterization would have pushed it a little higher in the pantheon of film noir.

Film noir is: man + woman + money = relentless doom and death. Clayton is: man + friend in trouble + androgynous corporate snake = some death, a little destruction, some soul-searching. Not quite the same sting.