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 what appears as 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.

Film Review: "State of Siege" --- Past Becomes Prelude

It's 1972, and Costa-Gavras, director of the political thriller "Z", has taken us to an unidentified Latin American country, with the first scene focused on this parked '48 Cadillac Series 62 convertible...  

Soon enough, one of the police cars in the background will circle around to this old Caddy, and an officer will discover the body behind the front seat.  It belongs to Philip Michael Santore, who had claimed to work for USAID in the country, which the Montevideo license plate tells us is supposed to be Uruguay.  The story is largely told by flashbacks telling us how we got here.  Before police find the body, though, we see armed squads of them stopping traffic and searching cars. It turns out that Santore was the last of 3 kidnapped officials whose fate and whereabouts were unknown.

In the flashbacks, we see the Tupamaros, a revolutionary group, kidnap 3 individuals.  Below, we see the moment they capture Santore, with his chauffeured green Chevy Nova trapped between a van and Peugeot, behind a Dodge Dart and Fiat 600, with another car behind. It turns out that the drivers of all these cars are involved in the abduction...

Santore, played with cool reserve by French actor Yves Montand, faces interrogations in a newspaper-lined cell hidden behind a secret door in a garage.  Over the course of several sessions, the masked interrogators reveal convincing evidence that Santore is not who he claims to be, and that he has been routinely advising the police on using torture to extract confessions.  Even after these revelations, Santore projects a calm attitude when answering questions, never raising his voice...

Here, another US envoy is about to be kidnapped in what appears to be his usual ride, a '64 Olds Jetstar I...

Below, Tupamaro "carpet cleaners" transfer the Brazilian Consul wrapped in a rug into another wagon from their red and white 1955 Chevy Nomad; whatever else you could say about them, the Tupamaros had good taste in cars to commandeer.  By 1972, a fascist military dictatorship was 8 years into its nearly 21-year rule in Brazil, and the Tupamaros regarded that government as an enemy.  By 1969, Tupamaros had shifted their tactics from symbolic protests and robbing banks (like John Dillinger, because that's where the money was) to even more brazen tactics, including kidnapping.  

In a later sequence, kidnappers driving a van get nervous about nearby police cars, and take a sudden detour to dump their other American captive, a less-valuable prize than Santore.  This scene has comic aspects, as we see the guy with the briefcase decide to ignore the squirming, blanket-wrapped captive in real time.  The scene seems a metaphor for the human capacity for denial...

The students at a local university are not in denial, however.  They can see the bad economy caused by rampant inflation, and attempts by an increasingly authoritarian government to censor speech and the press, all features of life in early 70s Uruguay.  In another comic scene, the police raid the campus while the students broadcast protest songs. The police run from one end of the quadrangle to another in their hapless attempts to find all the speakers...

Costa-Gavras dramatizes the slide from democracy to something much less by having perceptive and outspoken journalist Carlos Ducas (played by German actor O.E. Hasse) attend press conferences and a legislative session, where representatives argue, seemingly without fear of expressing divergent views.  At a press conference, a government spokesman asserts that the declared state of emergency (or "state of siege") has been extended 2 years beyond its authorization because the protests, strikes and kidnappings are "intolerable for the country." But Ducas (in brown tie on the right) bravely replies that something else is intolerable...

He seems aware of what's going on below the surface.  By the early Seventies, the police and government operatives were involved in extrajudicial killings, and Costa-Gavras dramatizes actual examples.  In the case of the abduction below, the death squad members don't bother to mask themselves (unlike the KKK a decade earlier in the US) because they are minions of the government, operating with impunity as anything like the rule of law collapses.  The agents drive their ubiquitous VW to their young victim's house, collect him from his stunned mother, and bring him to the beach, where they beat him and shoot him dead.

In the end, the Tupamaros decide to take more extreme measures of their own. After government agents round up key members of their movement, the president decides not to release political prisoners in exchange for Santore, and in a suspenseful set of votes that take place on a city bus and inside this green Caddy, the dissidents decide to kill him.  It seems that for once, Santore is right when he tells his captors that killing him would be a sign of cruelty and political powerlessness, but that deciding not to kill him would be a sign of weakness...that is, powerlessness.  In the real world events on which this story is based, when a US agent who had taught Uruguayan police torture techniques was killed by revolutionaries in 1970, the country spiraled into a cycle of repression, resulting in a 1973 military coup and followed by a dictatorship that lasted nearly a dozen years, and presaged the US-supported Pinochet coup in Chile by 2 months.  Ironically, Chile was where Costa-Gavras filmed "State of Siege", in what turned out the be the last full year of democratic government under President Salvador Allende.

Photo Credits:  All images are from "State of Siege", copyright 1972 by Valoria Films (France) and Constantin Films (Germany).

Two for the Road: Different Cars Mark the Eras of a Marriage

Director Stanley Donen's "Two for the Road" was released in late April 1967, right before the Summer of Love, but it reflected the concerns of a generation a decade older than the Flower Power crowd. At the same time, it served as a template for later road movie comedies, adopting nonlinear storytelling and sharp, witty, sometimes profane dialogue.  The musical themes, their tone reflective of a look into the past, were penned by Henry Mancini. If there's a more qualified candidate for our "Cars in Movies" series, we haven't seen it. The film begins with Mark Wallace (Albert Finney), a successful architect, and his wife Joanna (Audrey Hepburn) as they fly to France for a Riviera tour in their Mercedes 230SL. They reminisce about their previous trips to this coast, and what those trips have meant to them...

The cars mark the different eras in their summers and lives as students and later as a married couple.  They meet during a 1954 trip, first when Joanna rescues architecture student Mark's passport on the ferry from England, and later when the VW microbus carrying Joanna's choir is run off the road on the way to a music fest.  Mark comes to the rescue, but the choir (except for Joanna) comes down with chicken pox, and Mark and Joanna decide to hitchhike...

The hitchhikers find things to argue about, and eventually an Alfa driver picks up Joanna, but leaves  Mark by the roadside.  This is one of the few anachronisms in the car chronology.  The Bertone-bodied Alfa Romeo Giulietta Sprint was new in spring of 1954, but not this Giulia 1600 version with the big tail lights, from 1963.  Not long after this scene, the couple are reunited at the roadside, and in a scene at the beach, Joanna tells Mark she hates him.  He suggests they get married, and she agrees.

As the story develops, director Donen reinforces the irony and maintains the comic tone by using quick jumps forward and back in time.  This allows him to underline how the protagonists have changed, and to heighten the contrasts between the characters and their approaches to life.  These conflicts reach a hilarious boiling point in the 1957 trip, when Mark and Joanna, now married two years, share a new Ford Country Squire with Mark's ex-girlfriend Cathy, her husband Howard and their spoiled brat of a daughter Ruthie...

The American Maxwell-Manchesters are prototype permissive parents, spouting Freudian psychobabble at each other and at Mark and Joanna.  The Wallaces abandon the Maxwell-Manchesters not long after this scene, which follows a sequence where Ruthie throws a tantrum and pitches the car keys into the grass, stranding the party in their Ford at the roadside into the night...

The English couple finally gets to take a trip in their own car in 1959, when they bring this perky but hard-to-start 1950 MG-TD.  This was before product placement played such a big part in the production design of films...

But if they'd read the script of "Two for the Road", the minions of Morris Garages, now part of BMC, might have paid a ransom to keep this product of theirs off camera.  The couple's MG beings to make a funny noise on the way south, and eventually bursts into flame.    

This disaster paves the way for a critical plot turn, when the Dalbrets, a wealthy French couple, rescue the Wallaces and take them in this Bentley S1 to their seaside retreat at the Cote d' Azur.  Monsieur Dalbret introduces Mark to his Greek business partner, and this leads to a series of architectural commissions.  

A couple of years later it also leads to a solo trip to France for architect and new dad Mark, who has a fling with a blonde named Simone driving a blue Renault Floride. Lke many developments in this prototype road movie, the affair is presaged by a scene on a winding two-lane, when the two literally make passes at each other.  The red '61 Triumph Herald is Mark's new ride.  In summer of '63, the Wallaces go again to the Riviera and bring their young daughter Caroline. Mark is absorbed with work, and Joanna has an affair with David, a brother-in-law of client Dalbret.  A moment of truth occurs when Joanna returns to Mark, and he asks her why she has given up on David.   She replies, "He's too serious."  And this points out a theme of the story; Mark and Joanna are never so serious that they cannot laugh at themselves, or each other.

At fleeting moments in the story, the young couple on the roadside gets passed by their older, possibly wiser and certainly more prosperous selves. Towards the end of their "current" (1967) trip to Europe, Mark and Joanna have an argument in the Mercedes which, like this movie's quick cuts and sudden flashbacks and flash forwards, echoes French New Wave films, as well as dialogues between existentialists in Beat Generation cafés.  "What would you do if I didn't exist?" asks Mark.  Joanna replies, "I'd probably marry David."  When he says she's made his point, she replies, "But you do exist." 

The running gag of Mark misplacing his passport is repeated at the film's conclusion, when the couple stop at the Italian border control to present their documents.  Mark, nervous about making a meeting in Rome with another high-profile client, begins to panic, but Joanna quietly places the passport on the SL's steering wheel.  "Bitch", he says.  "Bastard", she replies.  In a movie marked by a consistent comic tone from start to finish, the viewer can assume this couple will continue their own comic interplay in the many miles (well, kilometers) ahead of them.

Photo Credits:  

Top and 2nd from bottom:  20th Century Fox

Remainder:  IMCDB.org (Internet Movie Cars Database)

Jacques Tati's "Trafic" from 1971: Monsieur Hulot Infiltrates the Car Industry

Director and actor Jacques Tati made his last appearance as Monsieur Hulot in "Trafic", released in 1971, around 18 years after his first appearance in "Les Vacances de M. Hulot" ("Mr. Hulot's Holiday"). In between those cinematic bookends, his famous tan raincoat and well-worn brown hat got plenty of wear, along with his umbrella. In "Trafic", Tati, who had tackled the perplexities of modernism in "Mon Oncle" and "Playtime", sends Hulot into the heart of the auto industry.  Somehow it seems appropriate that a culture that gave us flying CItroens with hydropneumatic suspensions (see above) would also give us an offbeat perspective on the car industry itself... 

It may be significant that in French back then, trafic signified some kind of racket or illicit trade.  The English meaning of traffic was connoted in French by la circulation.  In the title shot above, graphic designer Michel Francois signals the director's focus on the automobile's often zany effects on modern life.  The scene behind the title shows men working in a stamping plant making car bodies.

In the plot, Hulot has somehow gotten a job as an industrial designer for a fictional car company named Altra, a company that has assigned an American publicity agent, Maria (Maria Kimberly) to shepherd Hulot's new model to a car show in Amsterdam.  In keeping with the nomadic spirit of the era, he sketches out a whimsical little van for le camping.  Though Tati's critique of materialism is less sharply-focused here than in "Mon Oncle", perhaps because Europe and American were still in the afterglow of Woodstock Generation hippiedom, he shows how the revolution symbolized by camper vans could be commercialized.  Features of his little car include faux wood paneling in American style...  

…and a skylight over the sleeping space in the rear.  Along the route to the auto show, the crew gets help loading and unloading their van into Altra's transport vehicle. Not surprisingly, they get detoured by misadventures, including a flat tire and running out of fuel.

After transport driver Marcel breezes through Belgian customs without stopping, the little van is impounded by police, who suspect that it has been stolen.  Among the features of his design that Hulot demonstrates to cops and to Marcel is this grille that folds down into an actual grill, perfect for barbecuing steaks or burgers whilst involved in le camping.  

The police are impressed with all the features tailored to a life of le camping, but don't release the van until the next day, when the proper paperwork arrives.

Maria, who has run ahead to catch a preview of the auto show, returns and picks up Monsieur Hulot and they continue to follow the transport in Maria's yellow runabout (a Siata Spring 850) accompanied by her little pooch. They get involved in a chain-reaction car wreck in a roundabout, Hulot helps out an accident victim, and then they need to get repairs made. While that's happening, someone steals Maria's dog as a gag, and by the time the pooch is returned, they are running seriously late...

By the time they arrive a the Amsterdam show, all the exhibits are being dismantled, and Maria realizes she'd gotten the closing date wrong. It seems that Maria's talent for disorganization matches Hulot's own, and that the two characters are, as the French would say, sympathique...

Hulot investigates one of the last standing exhibits of a DAF 55, a non-fictional car from a Dutch company that today makes trucks.  He gets into the show stand car...

Then discovers it's a cutaway display rotating on a spit like a roasted chicken. Meanwhile the Altra company director discovers that his belatedly arriving team has been billed 300,000 francs for their non-existent exhibit, and fires Hulot.  It appears that Maria is now out of a job as well...

The two escape into a pouring rainstorm under Hulot's umbrella.  Director Tati gives us shots of comic interactions in the passing cars, including a couple whose hand gestures match the rhythm of windshield wipers, and Hulot and Maria draw together as they scoot in front of a rare Lancia Fulvia Zagato.  Though Tati has always been skeptical of the effects of cars on society, he's always managed to find choice cars for filming.

By the film's final scenes, Hulot and Maria are escaping the rains together after running the wrong way down a subway exit, and it's clear they're happily on their way somewhere that is not inside the auto industry. Director Tati's concluding scene, though, is of cars jammed into what looks like permanent gridlock, going nowhere, the result of the industry's and the advertiser's dream of offering Everyman his own private locomotive.  It's a gently funny movie, in a different spirit than the subversively comic "Mon Oncle", and without the often riotous hilarity of "Playtime", At release time, the New York Magazine critic Judith Crist praised "Trafic" for being a "non-blockbuster", and Tati's little road trip of misadventures still feels that way.

Photo Credits:  

All scenes from the film, including the initial publicity shot of the flying Citroen DS, are from Films de Mon Oncle and Les Films Corona.