Film Review: "Michael Clayton", Tony Gilroy's Masterpiece

  

We're in New York City, and Michael Clayton, a legal fixer for a powerful law firm, is leaving a poker game to handle a fatal hit-and-run by one of the firm's big clients. This client's problem soon turns out to be the least of Clayton's troubles, which include gambling debts and the bankruptcy of a restaurant owned with Michael's brother Tim. 

Minor troubles include a flickering GPS display on the dash of Clayton's Mercedes.  When you first watch this scene this may not register, but it will, later on, when the scene is framed in a different context.

 

After a frought meeting with the hit-and-run client, Clayton stops when he sees 3 horses in the dim light on a distant hill. It reminds him of a storybook illustration his young son Henry has shown him... 

Clayton approaches the horses slowly and is careful not to startle them. Intriguingly, there are not any fences or barriers in evidence during this scene.  If you are the kind of filmgoer whose enjoyment of mystery and suspense is undone by plot revelations, it might be a good idea to stop reading now.

This is because Clayton's car blows up during his contemplation of these horses.  

At this point writer and director Tony Gilroy takes us back to four days earlier, when star attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) has gone off his medication for manic depression and stripped naked during a court hearing of a suit against the firm's client, a pesticide maker named U / North. Arthur has become convinced that U / North is guilty of concealing the danger posed by their product, which has been implicated in hundreds of deaths.  We find out that he has also marked passages in the same storybook Henry mentioned, a fable about fighting for truth and justice called "Realm & Conquest".

We're also introduced to U / North's chief counsel, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton in an Oscar-winning performance), who berates Clayton for Arthur's odd behavior, while concealing the fact that she has picked up the chief attorney's abandoned briefcase.  Surveying its contents has led her to make some arrangements...

Those arrangements later turn out to be having a pair of assassins kill Arthur with a drug overdose. When it becomes apparent that Clayton, aided by his policeman brother Gene, has searched Arthur's apartment and found the key to a memo implicating U / North hidden in a copy of "Realm & Conquest", Karen makes some more arrangements. Gilroy shows us the scene of Clayton leaving the card game again, but this time leads up to this sequence with the killers placing a bomb in the Mercedes.  Then they take after him in their Buick.  Much of the story takes place in dark streets and dim light, a metaphor for the dark heart of the tale.

The bomb placement explains why the GPS screen in the Mercedes works intermittently. Clayton pounds on the dash to revive it, and the two killers lose their signal at several points on the drive...

We see the scene with the horses again, but this time we see Clayton throw his watch, wallet and phone into the flaming car.  At this moment, when he has decided to abandon the amoral corporate system, he is, in a way, as free as those unfenced horses...

He retrieves copies of the implicating memo and confronts Karen in the lobby outside U / North's board meeting. The dialog is sharply written and unforgettable."I'm not the guy you kill.  I'm the guy you buy."  He demands 10 million dollars to hide the evidence.  When Karen says this meeting will need more time, and should take place somewhere else, Clayton asks, "Where?  My car?" 

After Karen agrees that U / North will deposit the ten million in Clayton's bank account, he reveals he's been wearing a wire all along, and takes a confirming photo. The CEO emerges from the meeting and demands to know who Clayton is. He answers, "I'm Shiva, the god of death."

Then a team of police enter the hall and walk right past Clayton when the CEO demands they arrest him. Instead, they take the CEO and Karen, who has collapsed onto the floor, into custody.  Clayton's policeman brother Gene (Sean Cullen) asks if he's OK and then tells him to stay close...

In the final scene, Clayton boards a yellow cab (remember those?) and when the driver asks him where he's going, he just hands the driver some cash and says, "Give me fifty dollars worth."  You guess that in New York City traffic, a fifty-dollar ride could fall under the category of "staying close."

Photo Credits:  All images are from "Michael Clayton", released in 2007, with rights held by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and affiliated production companies.

Boulder No Kings: March 28, 2026

Thousands gathered at the Central Park Bandshell at 1 PM Saturday to start a march where we would wrap around Boulder's downtown, with local police closing portions of busy streets like Canyon, 9th, Pine and Broadway to assist, along with volunteers, in managing a large crowd...

It was a diverse, all-ages, multi-ethnic crowd, with students, families bringing small children, and some people in wheelchairs.  We saw no evidence of counter-protests or incidents of violence.  This protest was entirely a peaceful one...

"The wrong ICE is melting" echoes the concern of another sign that urged saving Boulder's National Center for Atmospheric Research, under attack by the Trump regime for "climate alarmism." University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit representing 129 universities, has sued the Trump administration over its effort to dismantle NCAR, for many years one of the best scientific resources for information on climate change caused by man.

There was a certain amount of poetic license exercised with regard to correct spelling.  Barron Trump spells his first name with 2 Rs, and fascism is usually spelled with an S before the C...

This being Boulder, there were dogs galore, some with their own messages to convey.  It was a warm Saturday, and I made a mental note to bring my thermos of cold water with built-in dog dish to the next event...

Use of abbreviations on display was widespread and clever...

The crowd included veterans of past wars, as well as their sons and daughters...

Tee shirts created for the occasion, like the posters that went with them, didn't need anything in the way of translation... 

Nationally, it turned out to be the biggest mass demonstration since Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million turned out.  This time, the turnout was estimated by several news sources at 8 to 9 million, which represents just under 2.6 % of the US population. According to researcher Erica Chenoweth at Harvard University, the threshold participation figure for non-violent protest that never fails to result in regime change is 3.5%.  So we may be getting close.  Next time we should invite more dinosaurs...

*Footnotes:  

An earlier post on a public commemoration in Boulder, the bicycle rally in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, appeared on January 31, 2026 under the title "Reflections on Kindness and Risk."

Photo Credits:

All photos are by the author.

Annals of Design: Worst Car Designs Part 6----Jaguar 00 vs. Tesla Cybertruck

Some political types, including a U.S. President with his own social media company, recently took time off from planning (or more likely, failing to plan) a war to denounce a Jaguar ad campaign for being "woke".  Apparently this was because a commercial featured multi-ethnic people of sometimes undefined gender wearing bright, high-fashion clothing that looked a bit to this writer like balloons. Oddly, though the commercial referred to a new Jaguar EV that "copies nothing", it failed to show any shots of the car.  When we got a look at the new Jag 00 (that's zero zero) we understood why...

The new all-electric concept car promises a thousand hp, and designer Gerry McGovern claims it was inspired by Jaguar's E-Type, a car that first appeared in April 1961.  Back in that era, in the back pages after the end of a paperback novel you'd see ads that might claim if you liked "All Quiet on the Western Front" you'd enjoy something from Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series, or that if you appreciated "Ship of Fools" you'd go for "Valley of the Dolls."  McGovern's claim to have been inspired by the E-Type seems to fall into the same category of fabricated links.  Just in case you weren't around for that new model intro in 1961, here's a shot of an early E-Type coupe to jog your memory...

Fail to see the resemblance between the E and the 00?  Apparently you have to squint really hard.  Or maybe take some kind of psychedelic medication...

The minions of Jaguar Land Rover have even gotten rid of the time-honored Jaguar type font on their concept car, along with the "leaper", the famous leaping cat symbol.  This may be part of an effort to get potential purchasers to lower their expectations, because the makers have also seemingly hit the delete button on any awareness that a car, even one with a thousand horsepower, must pass through the air.  Back when Malcolm Sayer designed the E-Type, he'd kept that in mind.  By contrast, the bluff-fronted 00 looks more like an escapee from a design studio full of truck mock-ups.

Ian Callum had aerodynamics in mind when he designed the F-Type, a very belated follow-up to the E-Type which began production in 2013 and sold nearly 88,000 copies over its production life of eleven years.  That's more cars than the E-Type sold over 13 years of production.  It all ended, though, in June 2024, when Jaguar stopped production of this and other car lines to prepare for producing a line consisting entirely of electrics with higher price tags.

The 00 designer Gerry McGovern is best known for his work on the latest Land Rover Defender, which is not a paragon of aero thinking, and has managed to revive running boards, along with an odd floating square of what looks like painted metal running over the C-pillar into the side rear windows.  Like just about any SUVs in the current market, it seems to be selling well.  But you don't need to be very old to recall what happened to SUV sales back during the great recession, when gas prices peaked in 2008.  

If there's something on the road that shares any design themes with the flat-fronted Jag 00, it could be Tesla's Cybertruck.  Despite being in the environmentally-friendly category of EVs, the Cyber manages to look as hostile as the 00.  Apparently in an effort to manage the difficulty of forming stainless steel, the designers went with flat panels.  This led to sharp edges all over the place, and with panels flying off some early examples.  The resulting form looks like it was designed to kill whatever it hits, and the nearly 7,000-pound vehicle has not been authorized for sale in the European Union.

Even wheels and tires, which are, after all, unavoidably round objects, are framed by crude looking angular cutouts. 

Who knows, perhaps the fashion for sharp-edged, angry-looking vehicles will go the way of other fashions like bell bottom jeans and waterbeds (they're gone, right?).  Fashion, in any case, has always been a mystery to this writer.  During an ominously warm winter of repeated wildfire alerts here in the West, it's appealing to remember that the best industrial designers are usually concerned with maximizing efficiency and avoiding waste, with the aim of getting the most from limited resources.

*Footnote:   The Jaguar E-Type has been featured in our posts before, on 8-13-17 ("Racing Improves the Breed") and  5-31-19 ("Buy an Old Jag; Save a Marriage"), and most recently on Sept. 30, 2025.  Previous posts in the Worst Car Design series appeared on 7-28-2016, 7-31-2016, 8-3-2016, 8-11-2016, 8-1-2017 and 6-20-2021. 

Photo Credits:

Top, 2nd & 5th from top:  Jaguar Land Rover

All other photos are by the author.