Michael Clayton could use color

There's a certain brand of George Clooney film I tend to avoid: the highly-serious real-world thrillers with complicated plots and nary a colorful moment to be found. The trailers strike me as lacking a certain cinematic punch. But when I heard the screenplay to Michael Clayton recommended by screenwriter Brian Koppelman I decided to check my funny bone at the door and give writer/director Tony Gilroy's treatise on why lawyers have the lowest job satisfaction rate of any profession a shot. (I'm sure I'll get around to Syriana and The American too eventually.)

True-to-form, Michael Clayton is smart, complex, and bone-dry serious. But the tone isn't just a stylistic choice by the filmmaker, it's a reflection of the characters' world: Clooney plays the title role, a high-end Manhattan law firm's 'fixer' whose job handling rich clients' problems is as grim and unfulfilling (his solution to a client's hit-and-run is to hire a lawyer) as his personal life dominated by divorce and addiction (a romantic subplot was tellingly cut). Even his gambling problem is boring, as he trades half-assed barbs with a sleepy-eyed plumber (Koppelman, in what I figure is an intentionally monotone cameo) over a downtown warehouse card table. There's no room for color in this movie because there's no room for color in Clayton's existence. Things are bleak.

Luckily there’s hope, in the form of Tom Wilkinson’s not-so-subtly-named Arthur Edens, an associate Clayton finds jailed for stripping naked in a deposition room after daring to go off his meds. Arthur has seen the light: “The world is a beautiful and radiant place,” he tells Clayton amidst manic declarations that he is “Shiva the God of Death,” and it’s no coincidence Arthur connects with the only other bright spot in Clayton’s life, Clayton’s 12-year-old son Henry, growing breathlessly fascinated during a happenstance phone call by Henry’s description of a fantasy novel’s characters’ ‘vision quest’ to a location they’ve only seen in their dreams. “They’ve been summoned,” Arthur observes. (Clayton shows no interest in his son’s novel in an earlier scene.)

Here's the problem: Arthur’s supposed to be defending an agro-chemical company in a $3 billion lawsuit, and his newfound enlightenment has him playing fast and loose with evidence of the company’s poisonous pesticide, emblazoning copies of an incriminating memo with the noticeably bright-red cover of Henry’s fantasy novel. Clayton pleads with him to stop: “As good as this feels, you know where it goes,” and it doesn’t take long to find out: Arthur’s execution, ordered in a cryptic, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene by the company’s jittery CEO (Tilda Swinton in an Oscar turn) comes in characteristically understated fashion at the hands of two frighteningly clinical enforcers, described in the script as feeling “No hate — no fear — no pleasure — nothing” as they ambush Arthur in his apartment, drag him into his bathroom and flood him with poison all in a single two-and-a-half-minute tracking shot. A final twitch of Arthur’s leg leaves both his body and the movie drained of whatever humanity was there — and Clayton adrift.

Of course, there’s always a near-death experience to help someone course-correct. Ostensibly worry-free, having accepted Arthur’s death as an accident and relieved of his own money troubles, Clayton nevertheless finds himself inexplicably speeding into the forest — “summoned” — until he’s face-to-face with three wild thoroughbreds in a moment of unfamiliar serenity. It’s his vision quest, and it just happens to save his life, sparing him from a car bomb ordered by Swinton’s still-jittery CEO. When the risen Clayton confronts her, initially demanding the bribe one would expect from a Manhattan law-firm’s fixer, the revelation that he’s actually recording the conversation for the NYPD is swift and simple, leaving us scrambling to keep up as he punctuates his deliverance with an homage to Arthur: “I’m Shiva, the God of Death!” The final shot is the first of pure cinematic artistry in the movie: under credits, we hold on Clayton’s face in the back of a cab, just looking around — finally seeing things in color.