This type of slick Hollywood production often gets short shrift when it comes to Best Of consideration. Yes, it did receive a boatload of Oscar nominations but lost most of them to the much more studied, oh so serious Coen brothers effort, No Country For Old Men. While no less psychologically rigorous, Michael Clayton didn’t wear its bleakness on its sleeve, thereby appearing less important.
Michael Clayton doesn’t cover any new territory (does NCFOM?). It’s a story of an amoral lawyer -- no, two amoral lawyers battling to keep from ultimately selling their souls. By using a slight narrative hiccup in order to avoid playing out like murder mystery/whodunit, Michael Clayton allows the audience to just sit back and watch the tale unfold seamlessly. Even the simplest, most basic of stories like this one are rarely executed as perfectly, almost effortlessly it seems, as this.
The script is airtight. The direction is smart and unobtrusive. The acting is spot on across the board, from the smaller roles like producer Sydney Pollack in his penultimate performance through to Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton in an Oscar winning role and George Clooney. For me, this is Clooney at his best. Coming in somewhere between the slick Danny Ocean thing he does and his goofy Coen Bros. antics, Michael Clayton allows Clooney to air out the charm but mix it with a tinge of desperation, world weariness and vulnerability. Clayton’s moment of hard earned, death defying triumph in his showdown with Swinton’s Karen Crowder brings out the absolute finest in Clooney when he spits out: You’re so fucked. Coming from Clooney, it’s not an in-your-face moment of braying victory but shaded with the recognition that, if things had broken slightly different, he could’ve been on the receiving end of the taunt. Like the movie itself, a thing of beauty. Simple, well earned and devastatingly affective.
#5) Talk To Her (2002)
No big Pedro Almodóvar fan I, in reading about Talk To Her it looked pretty much like the same ol’ same ol’ from him: female bullfighters, coma patients, rape, emotional anguish, soap opera melodrama. High camp and pretty pictures; of passing interest but leaving no lasting impression.
My preconception was both bang on and woefully off the mark. Yes, there was lots of high camp and the pictures were awfully pretty. But there was a sly humanism at work in the movie that was all the more effective because Almodóvar slipped it in subtly (yes, apparently he can be subtle) among the melodramatic plot, gorgeous cinematography and hilarious animation sequence. In the hands of a less dexterous filmmaker (and I am thinking of a coterie of ham-fisted Canadians here), Talk To Her would’ve wound up as an eye-splitting, over-wrought hand wringer. Instead, it was a pretty picture with a big heart of gold.
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No big Pedro Almodóvar fan I, in reading about Talk To Her it looked pretty much like the same ol’ same ol’ from him: female bullfighters, coma patients, rape, emotional anguish, soap opera melodrama. High camp and pretty pictures; of passing interest but leaving no lasting impression.
