By Armond White

Michael Clayton
Written & Directed by Tony Gilroy


George Clooney’s new potboiler, Michael Clayton, is the latest example of Hollywood’s trendy nostalgia. Hipster filmmakers keep looking backwards to the 1970s, hoping to disguise how ill-equipped they are to deal with contemporary social issues.
Zodiac, David Fincher’s latest meditation on violence, Jesse James/Robert Ford, Andrew Dominik’s meditation on history, and now Michael Clayton’s meditation on paranoia all share a shameless imitation of 1970s filmmaking styles. In fact, they imitate the dullest: Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men.

Following Pakula doesn’t represent a new classicism. In Michael Clayton, scene after scene of over-intense actors hyping it up in chiaroscuro settings means to convey the urgency of some unnamable fear, but such preciously staged moments of bourgeois panic weren’t any good 30 years ago either. This is actually just a new pomposity. President’s Men congratulated ’70s audiences on following President Nixon’s already-familiar downfall (with Woodward-Bernstein initiating media-celebrity). Michael Clayton commends modern audiences for enjoying the generalized air of contemporary cynicism (now led by media celebrities).

Although the Iraq War isn’t mentioned in Michael Clayton, political discontent—indicting a phantom administration’s corporate greed—covers Clooney’s millionaire mug. He plays a once-promising attorney, now demoted by his law firm into performing what during the Nixon era were called “dirty tricks.” Michael moves through the American business world on the lowdown, secretly fixing executives’ private messes. Yet good-guy Clooney’s never jaded. Having turned himself into the face of Hollywood self-righteousness (both on and off screen), there’s no way George Clooney can convincingly portray a common man.

Clooney exposes his Hollywood elitism when Michael Clayton mimics Erin Brockovich-style political heroism—a species of citizenship neither he nor director/writer Tony Gilroy quite understand; they just sentimentalize. Michael’s real problem is that he can’t shake his blue-collar, cop-family background and move up in class; he is left watching—while aiding and abetting—other peoples’ perfidy.

Confronting a subordinate worker’s compromised principles would require the filmmakers to be in touch with the working class’ inability to determine their economic fate. Michael is a high-stakes gambler and a failed restaurateur on the side; he’s stressed but he’s not disillusioned with business world ethics. He’s just trying to keep up. Gilroy and Clooney suggest everyone else is more corrupt than he is.

By referencing ’70s style (cinematographer Robert Elswit seems to use Gordon Willis’ lenses if not his exact lighting), Michael Clayton avoids true moral dilemmas. Clooney coasts on his snarky narcissism—modeling the character after glamorous embattled truth-seekers like Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor and Warren Beatty in The Parallax View. Reality check: Redford and Beatty weren’t movie stars because of their politics; they simply had charm. Besides, those movies did little more than feed into ’70s counterculture romanticism. With Gilroy’s help, Clooney peddles an actor-activist illusion based on an aberrant sense of the pop past. When Michael uncovers his firm’s crime (only after a friend has been killed), it’s a grandstanding act meant to reveal his last dregs of soul. “I’m a janitor!” he self-deprecates—piously suggesting that liberal actors are knights.

But what does that make the rest of us? Michael Clayton’s trite suspense gimmicks (such as a last-minute car chase whose outcome we already know) avoid the complexities of public behavior. Gilroy’s partiality is most glaring in the roles of Michael’s unlucky friend Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson doing an embarrassing rehash of Peter Finch’s hysteria in the 1976 Network) and with his female nemesis Karen Crowder (played by British actress Tilda Swinton, used for icy villainy). A fairer movie might have used Julia Roberts, seeking audience sympathy for a woman who turns herself into a cold-blooded corporate killer. But scapegoating the sharp-featured, thick-waisted Swinton (and her goon squad of blond neo-Nazi henchmen) lets the audience off the hook. By such trite villainy, Hollywood denies that average folk act in self-interest; it’s only, as the Village Voice likes to say, the Bush administration.

Too many political fallacies and moral presumptions hide behind Michael Clayton’s paranoid-thriller conventions. It’s clear that Gilroy lacks the convictions of 1970s directors when he chooses Chiaroscuro Baroque to depict the Enron era. It’s just stylistic frou-frou—like handsome hangdog Michael himself—with no insight or genuine curiosity. The paranoia of the 1970s doesn’t apply to the aughts (00s); it’s the refuge of political naifs, stuck in a Liberal mind-freeze, constantly referring to the past, hoping revolution is around the corner.

When Spielberg made the great, neo-’70s Munich, he used American Renaissance style to recreate a specific historical moment, not foolishly making the present suggest the past. Spielberg’s cinematic acuity caught the emotional authenticity of The Killer Elite, Z, The Day of the Jackal, Raid on Entebbe. Critic Gregory Solman even pointed out Eric Bana’s uncanny physical and temperamental resemblance to Jean-Pierre Léaud—a spiritual detail surpassing Gilroy’s superficial homages. Above all, Munich achieved active political and moral engagement. Its tracing of history led to the post-9/11 present—and mattered.

Michael Clayton’s trendiness ruins Clooney’s few attempts at baleful characterization, especially a long, climatic close-up which should have evoked the hero’s existential burden, like that borne by Bogart in The Harder They Fall or Paul Newman in The Verdict. Instead, it becomes Gilroy’s final, preening Pakula trope, with Clooney wearing Michael’s weariness like a fashion statement—on his way to the Oscars.