Fourth Down

Those who were expecting a football related post out of that title -- psych! No, this is about me seeing my fourth of the five nominees for this year's Best Picture Oscar, Michael Clayton.

I'll put this very succinctly up front: this movie stank on ice. I get this out of way first, because I'm not sure I'm going to be able to effectively articulate why I thought it was terrible. If I start to meander a bit, then you've already got the headline: this movie sucks.

The friend I saw it with made the observation: "this might have been a good movie about 20 years ago." By which he meant that in the last two decades, there have been plenty of other sort of "legal thriller"/"whistle blower"/"emotionally stunted hero" kind of movies in this same basic genre. And they've all been better, or had neater twists and turns along the way, or stronger endings. If I'd been in a cave for two decades and not seen A Few Good Men, or The Insider (hell, and I don't even like Russell Crowe!), or even a sub-par John Grisham adaptation, I might have found some suspense in this movie.

Instead, it's just ploddingly boring. The movie doesn't seem to want to string together a clear narrative, or demonstrate character behavior by showing them engaging with the plot. The movie is more of a "poem" if anything, more trying to convey the "sense" of who people are and what the hell is going on than laying it out.

We hear that the main character, Michael Clayton, is some kind of rock star "fixer" lawyer. But we never see him in action at this. Indeed, the opening act actually features someone calling him out on the carpet for being bad at this situation. He seems to be a soulless and unhappy fellow, but we don't get this in the course of him doing legal work, we see it in watching him fail to connect with his son, trying to avoid his alcoholic brother, coping with a large debt, trying to deal with a crazed attorney.

The plot, such as it is, involves a... I'm going to say senior partner and possibly mentor, although the movie fails to say so clearly... going off his meds and breaking down in the middle of defending a big class action suit against a large company. What the company does exactly and what the suit's about is left largely as a McGuffin without explanation. But we know that this crazy guy now thinks he's backing the wrong side, and he's going to expose the truth.

But he doesn't go about it in anyway that's believable if this guy has the long superstar career we're meant to accept he's had. He's just this side of batshit crazy in the movie, and our hero Michael Clayton is pretty damn stupid too for taking an hour and forty-five minutes to put together the pieces we the audience all see in a fraction of that time. (Because we've all seen a movie like this before.)

The movie even indulges in that now-cliche opening I've recently railed against, starting late in the action and then jumping back "four days earlier" to carry things forward.

There are only two good things in this entire film. One is the final scene between Michael Clayton and the character played by Tilda Swinton. It's really a great confrontation that you've been waiting for the whole movie (even more so for nothing interesting having happened along the way), and it actually does give you the "hell yes!" payoff you want.

The other is the entire performance of Tilda Swinton in general. She does an amazing job of portraying a self-doubting, unassured, nervous character. But even this gave me issues, because the story puts her as the PR face of a billion dollar company. I can't accept the reality of a person of this disposition in a position of that power. She would have been a fabulous character in some other movie, but it feels totally false in this one.

I rate this movie a D-. Even if you really want to say you've seen all five of this year's Best Picture nominees, I still say you should stop and reconsider that goal before stepping into this mess.