BEFORE: Well, history will regard George Lucas as equal parts filmmaker and business man, so there's my transition back to films about the corporate world, just in time to give Birthday SHOUT-out #37 to George Clooney (last heard in "Fantastic Mr. Fox"). And Lucas made a cameo appearance in "Star Wars Episode III", which also starred Ewan McGregor, who was in a film called "Young Adam" with Tilda Swinton, who appears here.
THE PLOT: A law firm brings in its "fixer" to remedy the situation after a lawyer has a breakdown while representing a chemical company in a billion-dollar class action suit.
AFTER: I missed this film when I took a look at the corporate world last September, and I skipped over it again when I did a chain of legal thrillers in January - well, I guess there's a proper time and place for everything.
This film is guilty of that non-linear arrangement that drives me crazy - usually the sign of what would be a weak story if fully arranged chronologically. This film takes the most exciting, interesting 10 minutes and screens that segment first - then a title card says "Four Days Earlier", and we get an explanation of the events leading up to the beginning scenes.
I stand by my bias, since the result is a film with a very exciting opening, a similarly exciting climax, and a whole lot of talkie-talkie in-between. Oh, sure, there's some corporate intrigue, but it's action that perks up the audience. Corporate mergers, gambling debts, mental breakdowns - these are the elements of dramatic tension, but not actual action.
And since we've SEEN the action scene already, at the beginning of the film, it really sort of defuses some of the dramatic tension later on - we already know exactly how a particular scene is going to end. Hitchcock would have handled this completely differently...
It's a shame, because Michael Clayton seems like a really cool character - the man they call when the crap hits the fan, a good man in a tight corner, a fixer, an arranger. He may not solve the problem directly, but he'll know the right person to call, and he'll keep his cool while doing it. The cops call him when someone needs a lawyer, the lawyers call him when they're in trouble with the cops, and the ladies - well, they just call him. (I'm assuming here, because it's Clooney...)
And there's also some mildly interesting stuff about corporate law - like how long can a lawyer defend a shady company without becoming shady himself? At what point in that process does one's conscience kick in, or should it? When does defending a shady client become the wrong thing to do, instead of the right thing, and where does one's paycheck fit into all of that? There don't seem to be many easy answers, but it seems like there probably shouldn't be.
Also starring Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Duplicity"), Sydney Pollack (last seen in "A Civil Action"), Michael O'Keefe (last seen in "Ironweed"), Terry Serpico, cameos from Ken Howard (last seen in "Clear and Present Danger"), Julie White (last seen in "The Astronaut Farmer"), Denis O'Hare (last seen in "Changeling").
RATING: 5 out of 10 memorandums (one point off for that "Four Days Earlier" stuff)
No comments:
Post a Comment