Given Michael’s clear expertise (demonstrated in the hit-and-run sequence) and the fact that he is in such demand (on call at any time of night), it seems strange that he is in such a financial position. His strained personal and family life and his disastrous restaurant investment all build pressure on him, but the main problem is the lack of precise professional identity, coupled to his effectiveness for an abusive system. When Marty (Sydney Pollack) explains later that he has created a niche, it should be one, given the logic of the system he is in, that pays well. The idea that someone who solves problems for others so well should be fallible in their personal life is a cliché of the detective genre, but that they should be so financially exposed seems unlikely. Gambling is a symptom of his unease with his life rather than the explicit cause of it. The roles that he plays in his job, charming health workers around Arthur, frightening Mr. Greer with facts about police procedure, or holding the phone away from his head for a second while he says he will fetch a pen (although he is already holding one)—all these are just part of his everyday life. Like Miles Massey he is dealing with super-rich clients, but unlike Massey here, as he says to Mr. Greer, there is “no play here, no angle, no champagne room.” The stakes are real.
Michael’s brother, Timmy (David Lansbury), is an alcoholic who has wrecked the early life of his son but who Michael eventually comes back to as a source of help after he has been supposedly killed by the bomb. His older brother, Gene (Sean Cullen), helps with the final sting operation on Crowder and his final words to Michael, “stay close,” underline that family ultimately comes through. Gene underscores Michael’s confused identity, in which “all these cops think you’re a lawyer” while “all these lawyers thinking you’re some kind of cop.” He concludes with “You know exactly what you are” but that may not be entirely true.
The security of Michael’s whole position relies on superior knowledge. This also means people keep their distance and also underlines his weakness when a lack of knowledge arises (over the impending merger for example). He is not losing his touch but he was never part of an inner circle to be kept abreast of changes. A deleted scene would have shown us a postcoital chat with Brini Glass (Jennifer Ehle), which shows how important he is to the company but would also underline weakness in Michael, in a relationship that is not really more than a stopgap and in which he parades his knowledge about a client (something he never does in the finished film).
The film is full of lengthy two-shots, mostly involving Michael, where actors deliver meaty dialogue in powerful exchanges, interspersed with wider shots or slower panning or rotating movements, such as Arthur and Michael in the cell or later in the alley. In the cell, Gilroy holds the shot on Michael as Arthur rambles on, the anger building as Michael is repeatedly interrupted. His anxious glances outside might convey fear that they are overheard or that their time together will be used up before he has had a chance to speak. When he does get a chance, we realize the frustration is due to Arthur coming off medication, something he had promised not to do. In the alleyway, we have a clear demonstration that “it’s not just madness” as Arthur had scrawled on the wall before leaping out of his hotel window. Arthur says he has needed time “to gather my thoughts,” to which Michael asks, “How’s that going?” We may have a man acting irrationally, carrying a bag with far too many baguettes for one person to eat, but at a moment’s notice he demonstrates precise knowledge of the law relating to mental health in the state of New York. It is a good example of an exchange with the minimum of intrusive camerawork, just two great actors delivering powerful lines.
Arthur’s speech about the culpability of U-North bleeds across shots of the killers listening in after tapping his phone, and his comment “the last place you want to see me is in court” ironically seals his fate, so that this speech constitutes his summary to a jury we never get to hear. The brutal murder of Arthur, from the knock on the door to his final heartbeat, is all one take, with just a slow zoom in to his foot to show the lethal injection in more detail and only a couple of whispered instructions between the men. With a single hand-held camera we follow the administering of an electric shock at the door, to something being put in Arthur’s mouth, to his being carried into the bathroom, to the injection and his pulse taken twice: all within 90 seconds. The killers, Verne and Iker, are described in the script as “flooding in … like machines” in a bizarre mix of the solicitous (catching Arthur as he falls, carrying him quickly and efficiently, wearing gloves, surgical boots, and even hairnets) and the murderous, with a final irony in the comment, “We’re good.”3
After Michael’s brief sight of Timmy, Gilroy initially uses a backseat camera position (a little like that used by Soderbergh for the jeep ride in The Good German) with the two passengers, Michael and Henry, in the dead space of the frame. Gilroy shows Michael in close-up, chewing, giving a slight shake of the head as if anger is building up, which eventually bursts out and he pulls over to talk. For all the rhetoric and all the bluster, however, there is an underlying desperation to his assertion that Henry is tougher than Timmy, and the statement “that’s not how it’s gonna be for you” seems more his worry than the boy’s, who just looks back at him bemused. Michael’s marriage may have failed, he may not listen closely to the boy’s prattle in the car or look at the book he had been given, but he is passionate that his son should have a better life. Michael is only just holding on here. His hug of Marty at the unofficial wake in the bar that follows is held slightly longer than Marty expects, and his repetition “I know it” underlines that he does not know anything anymore and the death of Arthur is a real shock.
The narrative structure, rerunning the section from the gambling den onward, suggests that we, like Clayton, do not know as much about the world around us as we think. Now, we glimpse the man just getting away from the car in time to plant the bomb, we realize why the SAT-NAV does not function properly, and we understand that the stress of Crowder at this point is less connected with speech than with her second assassination, this one very overt. Michael’s subsequent appearance to Crowder, a dead man inexplicably resurfacing, has elements of a ghostly visitation and of Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral.
However, he does not walk into the arms of his brother but past him, away from the life he knows but toward what, we can only guess. If his knowledge-based role had set him apart from his colleagues, to have sabotaged even that role leaves him completely isolated, even if morally vindicated. His mournful expression here also contains anger and frustration, seeming closer to breaking down in a way far more justified than Solaris or Syriana. Like his speeding away from Greer’s house, he declares to his brother to whom he hands the phone, “I need some air.”
The final shot, a nice way to encourage cinema audiences to stay in their seats and read the credits, and our last view of Michael, is not akin to the fist-thumping elevation of a Rocky-style narrative; we are not celebrating the victory of the underdog. Rather we are closer to the end of The Long Good Friday (John Mackenzie, 1980), where gangland boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is shown also in the backseat of a car, albeit at gunpoint, and we see a similar range of emotions (self-loathing, resignation, and grief) pass over his face and do not need to see the end of either journey to realize that both men are, to some extent, broken. Clayton has been brought to the realization articulated by Arthur at the beginning. He has become Arthur’s heir, “Shiva, the god of death,” bringing down two of the most immoral figures that he works with but many, and the system that produced and supported them, still remain. He has betrayed the company that just lent him $80,000, which they will no doubt want back, the basis of his trade (trust) may be lost by his openly acting as a whistle-blower, and there is no clear sign of how he can function professionally as he is still caught between the legal and criminal worlds, fitting securely in neither. His instruction to the driver (an uncredited vocal contribution by Gilroy himself) to just drive suggests this aimlessness.
Michael Clayton has a slight feel
of conspiracy theories like Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974), in its depiction of faceless corruption and a willingness to kill anyone to maintain economic (and political) power. In Michael Clayton, it is not a matter of a corporation having to seek out alternative criminal worlds for the assassins. We see Verne and Iker at the golf course, sporting U-North logos on their bags. They are the company. On the film poster, the X-Files-style slogan (“The truth can be adjusted”) is more central and in larger font than the title of the movie itself and placed over a slightly blurred image of Michael.
Clooney originally rejected the role, deterred by Gilroy as a first-time director, but the status of the producers here (Soderbergh, Pollack, and Anthony Minghella) is very impressive, reflecting the strength of their belief in Gilroy’s script and his ability to realize it on-screen.
Legendary scriptwriter William Goldman described Clooney as “giving the performance of his career,” and certainly there is a strongly mournful, elegiac quality to the film, largely implicit in Michael’s character and brought out in Clooney’s delivery of it.4 As a fixer, he solves people’s problems, taking their guilt away, a role performed by priests in former times. As Arthur says to him about the “burden” such work creates, he is a social purger of sins, a role that takes a toll on his own soul in the carrying of knowledge about the sins of others. The role works only if he keeps this knowledge and does not pass it on, but to keep it exacts a heavy price, etched on his careworn features.
The American (Anton Corbijn, 2010)
Keeler: It is like entering a different time zone. You’re an outsider, isolating yourself. You’re condemned … You have become mere sadness and live in a different state of mind.
—Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
The opening prologue in Sweden sets the stylistic markers found in the body of the film. Our first sight of Jack (George Clooney) shows him sitting forward, unsmiling, drinking whisky, next to a naked girl, Ingrid (Irina Björklund). It may be a theoretically romantic cliché with an isolated situation, a log cabin, and a roaring fire, but Jack’s look of melancholy and need for tense shoulders to be massaged suggest he is not at ease. Handheld, shaky point-of-view shots, like the slow tracking shot toward the cabin, suggest the presence of a would-be assassin but there is no attack on them at this point (denying us an action-based opening such as in The Spy Who Loved Me, Lewis Gilbert, 1977). Similarly, as Jack subsequently outsmarts the second killer, circling behind him, we have a point-of-view shot from behind the car but this is not immediately followed by Jack’s surprise attack. We are denied viewing positions that can be easily identified simply with an antithetical force, creating a sense of unease from the outset. The editing pace is leisurely, almost ponderous (Jack is held in shot, motionless, staring out from the car ferry for 10 seconds), action scenes are shown in long or extreme long shot (there is no cutting to close-ups for dramatic effect), and there is little or no use of a soundtrack to heighten the drama of physical action.
As a character, Jack is also far from simple. For the first time, we see Clooney play a character that shoots an apparently innocent girl (with whom he had some form of relationship), and yet via a blend of performance, direction, and script his character retains an element of viewer sympathy. It is not until he meets Clara (Violante Placido) that he addresses another character face-to face at length. He avoids direct eye contact where possible, denying himself the kinds of human contact that he knows his chosen profession makes impossible to sustain. As Pavel (Johan Leysen) tells him, “Don’t make any friends.” However, either by luck or simply that others respond to a need they feel in him, other characters do reach out to him, most obviously the priest, Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli). Invited to the priest’s house, Jack sits at a table with him but does not look at him; and in making contact with Mathilde (Thekla Reuten), the pair sit at adjacent tables at an outdoor café again avoiding direct glances. The opening credits, played out over a lengthy shot as Jack drives down a road tunnel, suggest a shadowy character whose destiny is set on a particular course.
Once in Castel del Monte, Corbijn takes this a stage further with a large number of tightly framed shots of Jack, often from directly behind him, which might be the point of view of an assassin about to stab him in the back, but since Jack frequently twirls around as he walks, it suggests the presence of an entity, closely following, almost like a notion of conscience. The geography of the town is never made clear. Jack approaches his small apartment from different routes, and in several scenes we see him walking at night shot from in front and behind with tight shots that do not allow us to see clearly where he is going or whether he is being followed. From the first time he walks through the town in daylight, the narrow medieval streets, blind corners, and steps that seem to go back on themselves form a visual fabric like an Escher picture, creating a Kafkaesque, paranoid sense of being watched and followed. This creates ambiguity from the outset, like the backfiring scooter, before it is clear there are specific assassins seeking to kill Jack. As the pressure mounts, we have a slowly rotating top-shot above the rooftops of the town, still denying us a sense of precise geography, and cut with a soaring bird of prey, suggesting the gathering of forces against him.
Corbijn’s former profession surfaces not just in his picture composition or the choice of photographer as an alibi for Jack but in the numerous spectacular long shots of Castel del Monte, sometimes at night or with mist rolling in. There are many, many shots of a single car winding through the landscape, mostly in extreme long shot, both day and night, emphasizing just how alone Jack is but also creating something of the cold aesthetic of car commercials or pictures used for calendars. This is reflected in the tie-in publication, Inside the American (2010), which showcases Corbijn’s extraordinary eye for minor detail and the relationship of framing and available light.
Gradually, through glimpses of his tattoo, the book that he drops on waking, and the nickname given him oddly by both Clara and Mathilde (“Mr. Butterfly”), suggesting some kind of link between them, we realize that Jack does have an interior life, albeit one starved of the oxygen of human contact. He takes Mathilde to the riverside spot as much for its nature as for the isolation it affords them. The romantic connotation in the notion of a riverside picnic is destroyed by his profession. On dropping Mathilde back at the station, she thanks him for a lovely day at which his head drops. This is the best he seems able to hope for. A beautiful woman and a romantic setting (opportunity and motivation in crime terms) are not enough. He is suppressing his need for human contact and we see its toll on his spirit, writ large in his careworn face and tears welling up.
At dinner, he buys Clara a rose, which she says make them look like a couple, at which Herbert Grönemeyer’s piano theme cuts in (used relatively sparingly throughout) to underline that, as Jack tears up again, he realizes that they can never be like that. His profession makes him suspect everyone, poisoning relationships so that he imagines Clara is carrying a gun to kill him, leading to the tense scene by the river and destroying its potential for romance. The first time the scene was spoiled by the presence of active evil, the second time by the suspicion of evil, and the third and final time because it arrives too late for Jack to exploit.
Clooney appears in virtually every scene. With a relatively small cast, the appearance of other characters matters only as they relate to him, almost as aspects of his own personality. We are offered some new sides to his film persona. His naked torso is seen performing press-ups, chin-ups, and some impressive stretching exercises. His body here seems functional rather than in condition to be looked at. He also has a previously unseen profession: not just that of killer but of gun maker. Despite protesting the contrary, Father Benedetto notes that Jack is good with machines, perhaps in lieu of human contact. The speed with which he manages to find useful components from the junk in the garage of Benedetto’s son, Fabio, may stretch credibility, but Corbijn’s cropped shots suggest Jack’s hands almost act independently of his
body in weighing the suitability of various tools and spare parts.
We also have the longest love scene in the Clooney canon in an extremely erotic encounter with Clara. As elsewhere, Corbijn refuses to cut to close-ups but allows his actors to pass out of shot before coming back, remaining focused for the most part on Clara’s face, as she appears to be enjoying what Jack is doing. He says afterward that she does not have to act with him and that he just wants her “to be exactly who you are,” which suggests both that he is tired of the phoniness of his life but also that her show of pleasure was in some measure faked. The morality of her job does not seem to trouble him, even when she says she is carrying a gun because she is scared of being attacked (there have been attacks on prostitutes nearby) and she must work that night; i.e., she is sleeping with other men for money while appearing to be in love with him. He claims earlier that he does not visit other women, reflecting an oddly chivalrous view of fidelity, but is apparently relaxed about her not doing the same. Perhaps his attitude to her job and her name, suggesting clarity, is suggestive of a forgiving nature, interested in souls more than physical actions.
It is clearly a tale of sin and redemption, most obviously in the dawn exchange between Jack and the priest but from the outset too in the cross seen in the foreground of the shot of Castel del Monte, the priest looking down benevolently above Jack as he walks down the steep alleyways for the first time and the doleful bell that punctuates the narrative. However, Jack does not heed the call to prayer, using the bell sound to cover his action in hammering a part of the gun he is making. At the moment he finishes the gun and later the fake briefcase, he lays his hands on it in an act of apparent blessing or finds a moment of peace. Unlike Father Benedetto, who crosses himself before eating, this small act suggests Jack finds the possibility of grace in his everyday actions, as if his body is instinctively looking for spiritual peace, even if he does not consciously recognize it. By the end despite being offered the chance to confess and purge his soul, Jack bypasses orthodox religion, noting earlier “I don’t think God’s very interested in me.” Looking down at Mathilde as she lies dying from the rifle misfire he instigated, it is he who administers a form of the last rites, demanding who she works for. In his naiveté, he still has not realized the source of his betrayal (or in some sense is in denial). His redemption is in the form of preventing an assassination by sabotaging the rifle, killing his betrayer (Pavel), but most of all struggling to meet Clara by the river.
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