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The Rewatchables ·

Michael Clayton

year 2007decade 00sdirector Tony Gilroygenre Drama
host Chris Ryanhost Justin Charityhost Lindsay Zoladz
All 13 categories

Most Rewatchable Scene · 29:42

The final Michael-Karen confrontation and the $50 cab ride

The category is framed as what you type into YouTube after 'Michael Clayton': the final Michael-Karen confrontation, the Westchester hit-and-run consultation, Arthur Edens' baguettes, meeting Arthur in the Milwaukee jail, Karen Crowder contracting the hitman, or Michael's speech to his son in the car.

Lindsay Zoladz: The pick is the Michael-Karen confrontation: the last ten minutes are perfect, especially the long shot of Michael walking away from the scene, Michael's cop brother who has been recording it coming into frame, Karen collapsed in the background, and the seamless shift to Michael in the cab with a favorite line, 'Give me $50 worth.'

The Neil McCauley “A Book about Metals” Award for Best Line from the Movie · 1:08:19

"Michael, I have great affection for you and you live a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man, not an attorney"

Nominees read aloud: Michael's 'I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy' speech about having sold out Arthur for 80 grand; Arthur's 'you're a bag man, not an attorney'; Michael's 'There is no play here. There is no angle. There's no champagne room. I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor'; the $50 cab line mentioned before; and Arthur's 'I am Shiva the god of death'.

The film

Michael Clayton (2007)

Directed by Tony Gilroy · Drama

120 minutes

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Cast

Selected cast credits · Film reference

George Clooney Michael Clayton, attorney at Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen
Tom Wilkinson Arthur Edens, attorney at Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen
Tilda Swinton Karen Crowder, counsel at U-North
Sydney Pollack Marty Bach, managing partner at Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen
Michael O'Keefe Barry Grissom, attorney at Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen
Ken Howard Don Jeffries, U-North's CEO
Denis O'Hare Mr. Greer, a wealthy client of the firm who is involved in a hit-and-run
Sean Cullen Gene Clayton, Michael's brother, a police detective
Merritt Wever Anna Kaiserson, one of the plaintiffs against U-North
David Lansbury Timmy Clayton, Michael's brother
David Zayas Detective Dalberto
Robert Prescott Verne, the principal hit man
Terry Serpico Iker, the second hit man
Bill Raymond Gabe Zabel

Everything from the episode

In the order the hosts got to it. Open a row for the discussion.

25:04

Casting What-Ifs

Denzel Washington was offered Michael Clayton and turned it down; Mark Wahlberg as Michael Clayton (floated as a joke...

Denzel Washington was offered Michael Clayton and turned it down; Mark Wahlberg as Michael Clayton (floated as a joke, rejected); Chris Cooper as Marty Bach (rejected, allowed as Barry)

In the discussion (9)
Approx. transcript time · 00:25:04Read transcript
  • The one really interesting casting what-if: the role was originally offered to Denzel Washington, who in a GQ interview named Seven and Michael Clayton as the two roles he most regretted turning down, and who was scared off by Tony Gilroy being a first-time director.
  • Denzel later played a lawyer for the other Gilroy brother, Dan Gilroy, in last year's Roman J. Israel, thought underrated or misunderstood and remembered mostly for his Best Actor nomination.
  • Denzel is really good at playing exasperated, so his version would have been a different take: Clooney is not exasperated but conflicted in a repressed way, whereas Denzel would have been much more 'what do you want me to do?' — Justin Charity
  • Asked for a Michael Clayton line in a Denzel voice, the request gets a flat no, but the 'I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy' line is delivered anyway and called incredible.
  • Denzel is thought better in films like Crimson Tide or Malcolm X where he leans into his charisma, though his choices show he likes playing downtrodden, beaten-down, morally compromised people, as in Inside Man from around the same time, the film one participant watched right before seeing Michael Clayton for the first time.
  • Asked who else could be imagined as Michael Clayton, the answer is that this is a very hard one to recast because everybody seems really well cast. — Lindsay Zoladz
  • Mark Wahlberg as Michael Clayton is floated and knocked down: he would try to play the hero too much, whereas Clooney's performance is never triumphant, dejected and tired in the cab at the end rather than smiling, and Wahlberg would look for the noble firefighter element; the proposer confesses the suggestion was meant partly as comedy, since Wahlberg's weird, confused tone could have made a funny alternative take.
  • Chris Cooper as Marty Bach: there is a running list of aughts films that either have Chris Cooper in them or are defined by the fact that they should have, and this people-in-suits, corruption-everywhere, racing-to-do-the-thing film is a classic Chris Cooper movie. — Justin Charity
  • Chris Cooper would be allowed as Barry but not as Marty, because Pollack in that role is a classic look.
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29:42

Most Rewatchable Scene

The final Michael-Karen confrontation and the $50 cab ride; the baguette scene with Arthur in Times Square; the Westc...

The final Michael-Karen confrontation and the $50 cab ride; the baguette scene with Arthur in Times Square; the Westchester hit-and-run consultation with Greer ('I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor')

In the discussion (10)
Approx. transcript time · 00:29:42Read transcript
  • The category is framed as what you type into YouTube after 'Michael Clayton': the final Michael-Karen confrontation, the Westchester hit-and-run consultation, Arthur Edens' baguettes, meeting Arthur in the Milwaukee jail, Karen Crowder contracting the hitman, or Michael's speech to his son in the car.
  • The pick is the Michael-Karen confrontation: the last ten minutes are perfect, especially the long shot of Michael walking away from the scene, Michael's cop brother who has been recording it coming into frame, Karen collapsed in the background, and the seamless shift to Michael in the cab with a favorite line, 'Give me $50 worth.' — Lindsay Zoladz
  • You cannot tell an Uber to give you $50 worth, and $50 no longer buys a mind-clearing cab ride in New York; starting in the financial district you would need at least a hundred.
  • The ending is a showdown between Swinton and Clooney, though not a classic one: pathetic in a weirdly captivating way, with Michael avenging Arthur, whom Karen has had killed; any good confrontation begins with someone you thought was dead reappearing, and the clip is played ('I'm not the guy that you kill. I'm the guy that you buy').
  • Asked for the most rewatchable scene, the answer is the baguette scene, just on its face: it has a weird whiplash, beginning with Clooney running up on Wilkinson after leaving his kid in the car, Wilkinson wandering the earth through a Times Square montage with a bag of baguettes, Clooney seeming to have the upper hand and asserting dominance as the persuasive talker while Wilkinson stammers and holds the baguettes the whole time. — Justin Charity
  • At the end Wilkinson digs deep and finds the fastball; the clip is played of Arthur's calm rebuttal ('you're a bag man, not an attorney'), explaining that Michael should have kept him in Wisconsin and that the single criterion for involuntary incarceration is danger, and it plays as Arthur very calmly listing all the ways Michael fucked up and then saying goodbye.
  • Lawyers out-lawyering each other is the film's great recurring interaction and this one is maybe the favorite; another participant has the baguette scene as a close second; the bag is counted at a dozen baguettes, not fifteen, which Arthur never eats, since they sit untouched on the counter in the apartment shot, prompting the 'baguette watch' joke.
  • A uniquely New York thing: bumping into someone coming home after being out all night while you are getting coffee, the 'did you get some bread?' guy; everybody has been the bread guy, everybody has been Michael Clayton, and the film nails the embodiment of two people who did not want the encounter running at each other as if they see each other on the street all the time.
  • The third pick, in the top ten of one participant's overall YouTube searches, is the 'I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor' scene; the clip is played ('There's no play here. There's no angle. There's no champagne room'), and it is called an effective piece of screenwriting from a film that feels loose and organic yet is built like a little model boat in a glass bottle.
  • Not a single piece of the film fails to build toward something else, and this entertaining, hilarious scene tells you everything about Michael, who barely speaks until the end while Greer rants about the guy running in the middle of the street at midnight and tries angles like saying the car was stolen, and Greer's wife dramatically throws a cocktail glass at the wall in their rich kitchen; instead of the expected fix, Michael defeatedly offers to get a criminal lawyer there in fifteen minutes, making himself the middleman; the scene has been watched maybe a thousand times and is called by far the most rewatchable.
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38:06

What’s Aged the Best?

The film's specific post-Enron, pre-financial-crisis moment of lots of money and lots of paranoia

The film's specific post-Enron, pre-financial-crisis moment of lots of money and lots of paranoia

In the discussion (6)
Approx. transcript time · 00:38:06Read transcript
  • Candidates offered: Clooney's stubble, the unadulterated footage of Clooney chilling in cabs or in his Mercedes, flip phones, or the Trump-era vibe of complicity within a corrupted system; the three of them nostalgically look back at the days of being reachable only by flip phone.
  • This capsule of movies is associated with Bush-era cynicism and total Chris Cooper vibes, the first time one participant started really watching dad movies about talkers and players; the janitor sequence is Michael Clayton shrugging off the magic of lawyerdom.
  • A timeless post-9/11 cynicism about how soul-crushing systems are not magic and are moved through by money rather than hyper-competence; the film makes sure you understand Clooney is not the best to have ever done anything, just a man who put himself in the service of the right people, who only sounds ineffectual once he stops representing those interests, left with his $80,000 and his dead friend Arthur.
  • All of the above: a shout-out to the script supervisor for the continuity of the levels of stubble, from five o'clock shadow to several days unshaven, across the four-days-ago flash structure; an all-time great flip phone movie that made the speaker want to go back to a Motorola, because if Clooney can take down U North without an iPhone there is no need to tweet; and the grainy flip phone photo of Karen at the end ('I gotcha'). — Lindsay Zoladz
  • One of the last great American thrillers pre-iPhone: scenes would be plotted differently with a smartphone, since so much of the film is having to go see people, and Arthur could have been found more easily by text, although a man really hiding should not walk around with a conspicuous bouquet of a dozen baguettes; the mood is post-Enron but pre-financial-crisis Bush era, with a whole whistleblower vibe, and since those themes are unfortunately current again the film has aged impressively against other Bush-era movies.
  • Wondering whether they would feel the same doing the podcast again in 2028, the dialogue and jargon are singled out first despite being rooted in a changing industry, along with the law-firm environment: a wake for Arthur would still be in the bar where Barry and Marty hug at the end, and Marty Bach would still be in his Long Island home with his dress shirt untucked going through files; the award then goes to the use of that specific post-Enron, pre-financial-crisis time with a lot of money and a lot of paranoia.
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45:29

What’s Aged the Worst?

The car bomb and the time spent on the drive upstate; the U North expose material in the middle of the film

The car bomb and the time spent on the drive upstate; the U North expose material in the middle of the film

In the discussion (3)
Approx. transcript time · 00:45:29Read transcript
  • Nobody dies in car bombs anymore: after the precise, tactile, chilling way the hitmen kill Arthur, picking him up and lifting him and saying 'we're moving', the car bomb is the opposite, planted on the Lower East Side and requiring the killers to be a certain distance away to activate it at the exact moment Michael is out looking at the horses; since the opening already shows he survives, too much time is spent on the car-chase stretch.
  • Clooney driving at night looks like a Matthew McConaughey Lincoln commercial, but the GPS won't work because there is a bomb in it; they killed the other guy so well.
  • A somewhat controversial opinion: by the third, fourth or fifth viewing the U North material in the middle plays like Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action pop legal thriller, including the fake commercial and the scene where Wilkinson makes a remix of the U North song, and since there is no ambiguity that Tilda and Don Jeffries are the villains once you see them, the memorandums proving U North's crimes hold no surprise; still, this would be the best thing in ninety percent of other movies.
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47:55

Half-Assed Internet Research

George Clooney and Michael O'Keefe both played boyfriends of Laurie Metcalf on Roseanne; Michael Clayton was Catherin...

George Clooney and Michael O'Keefe both played boyfriends of Laurie Metcalf on Roseanne; Michael Clayton was Catherine Waterston's first feature; Brian Koppelman is the poker player who roasts Michael about hair plugs; the horses appear in Realm and Conquer; Tony Gilroy spent a couple of years getting it made and Clooney passed once or twice

In the discussion (5)
Approx. transcript time · 00:47:55Read transcript
  • Both George Clooney and Michael O'Keefe, who plays Barry, played boyfriends of Laurie Metcalf on Roseanne.
  • Catherine Waterston (as transcribed) makes her first feature appearance as the lawyer in the Milwaukee hotel room who answers Michael's questions about who is taking the deposition and where his briefcase is.
  • The player roasting Michael at the Chinatown poker table is Rounders and Billions writer and friend of the Ringer Brian Koppelman, who subjects himself to a hair-plugs joke ('you bought yourself some new hair' / 'yeah, with your money'); the film has spawned little controversy or behind-the-scenes drama.
  • Tony Gilroy tried to make the film for a couple of years and George Clooney passed on it once or twice, but it was ultimately a smooth ship; it did not do well at the box office yet became a touchstone people wish Hollywood still made.
  • Teased earlier as half-assed internet research: the horses appear in Realm and Conquer.
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50:09

The Dion Waiters Award for Best Heat Check Performance

Sidney Pollack

Sidney Pollack

In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 00:50:09Read transcript
  • The award goes to someone with very little screen time who makes the most of it, and this is called a unanimous election for Sidney Pollack, an acclaimed director in his own right who was born to play Marty Bach; the clip is played of Marty reading Arthur's files and realizing he is building a case against U North.
  • Michael O'Keefe, Dennis O'Hare and Merit Weaver (as transcribed) are floated as other candidates; one voice is sold on Pollack despite having tried to dethrone him with Chris Cooper purely out of loyalty to Cooper, and a further 'I have to go Sidney Pollack, too' follows.
  • In retrospect it is an elegiac role, since Pollack died about six months after the film came out; IMDb shows his actual final acting credit was the 2008 rom-com Maid of Honor (as transcribed), one of the great title puns, which one participant saw in the theater while skipping Michael Clayton; this is counted as his final performance, a fitting homage to the films he directed and to his presence as an actor.
  • Pollack makes Marty so lived in, sunken eyes and all, that it has a trickle-down effect on everyone else's performances; Dennis O'Hare, as the man who does the hit and run in his Jaguar, is in the truest sense of the Dion Waiters Award probably the winner and will get a different award, but Pollack does the most with the time he has on screen.
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52:53

Apex Mountain

Tony Gilroy; George Clooney

Tony Gilroy; George Clooney

In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 00:52:53Read transcript
  • Is this Apex Mountain for Tony Gilroy: the only other contenders are the Bourne films; one participant is a fan only of the first Bourne, another a big fan of The Bourne Legacy, which Gilroy directed, with its homoeroticism between Jeremy Renner and Oscar Isaac (less explicit than Skyfall, though they spend a night in a cabin) and an unsung Edward Norton performance, 55 to 60 minutes of a perfect movie before an exhausting hour-long car chase through Manila; the conclusion is that this is easily Gilroy's Apex Mountain.
  • Asked whether this is Apex Mountain for George Clooney, the answer is 'I do': there are not a ton of Clooney performances the speaker loves, said through clenched teeth, but there is a precision here, the razzle dazzle without overdoing anything, neither leaning on a hero trope nor playing a dirtbag, riding a line that should make the role ambivalent, and he nails it.
  • This is peak phase-two Clooney and a favorite performance of the second half of his career, with Out of Sight as phase one; it kicks off his sad-sack period, playing a man no woman in the film is attracted to, which may not be realistic. — Lindsay Zoladz
  • Tilda Swinton is placed at the beginning of her American peak rather than at a summit; her Oscar speech for the film, recommended for rewatching, teased Clooney for wearing his Batman costume with the nipples under his Michael Clayton suit while he laughed in the front row, and the 2007 and 2008 Oscars are remembered as a good era with a great crop of films.
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1:00:02

Unintentional Comedy Award

Everything Tilda Swinton does, starting with the armpit washing; the baguettes; the horses; Arthur's Times Square ben...

Everything Tilda Swinton does, starting with the armpit washing; the baguettes; the horses; Arthur's Times Square bender montage; how kind and reasonable the loan shark Gabe is; the hitman who looks like Gordon Ramsay

In the discussion (3)
Approx. transcript time · 01:00:02Read transcript
  • Everything Tilda Swinton does is right on the edge of comedy, which is why the performance is brilliant, starting with the armpit washing in her first scene; the baguettes are very funny, but since the choices illustrating Arthur's manic episode off his meds are so deliberate they may not count as unintentional; the horses toe the line, especially next to the Three Billboards parallel, and are definitely memeable according to the Michael Clayton Tumblr community.
  • Where Arthur got the bread in Chinatown and how far he walked with it is wondered about; the Arthur montage is when the film most feels like a Satoshi Kon movie, a freed man on a surreal purifying bender through a long Times Square shot, cartoonish in an unexpected format, which drew laughs not because it is ridiculous but because every other character is repressed, hyper-professionalized and animated by anxiety.
  • Amusing if not strictly unintentional, given how much evil is done in the film: how kind and reasonable the loan shark Gabe is, advising that paying only twelve thousand now would make them worry, far more accommodating than a Honda dealership; and one of the hitmen, at certain angles, looks so much like Gordon Ramsay that it was distracting but raised the image of Ramsay silently killing a rival chef.
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1:03:28

Probably Unanswerable Questions

Why was this movie allowed to be made, when it is so loopy and whimsical compared with its straightforward corporate-...

Why was this movie allowed to be made, when it is so loopy and whimsical compared with its straightforward corporate-greed marketing?

In the discussion (2)
Approx. transcript time · 01:03:28Read transcript
  • Having hit many unanswerable questions already, the one that keeps a participant up at night is why this movie was allowed to be made.
  • At the poster and trailer level it looks like solid ground, a movie about greed with a shady corporation and a shady law firm and a capable man making tough decisions, but the first conversation between Michael and Arthur is loopy, heightened, deranged and colorful, the tone then becomes ambitiously all over the place, and it is far more whimsical than any promotion or even the casting suggested; 'George Clooney is doing a serious role' does no justice to how loopy and insane it is, and you cannot get to 'I am Shiva, the God of Death' from a tagline about bringing them all down one by one. — Justin Charity
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1:03:50

Picking Nits

Arthur's creepy obsession with Anna; the car bomb logic of driving upstate and waiting instead of blowing it up in We...

Arthur's creepy obsession with Anna; the car bomb logic of driving upstate and waiting instead of blowing it up in Westchester; why the hitmen needed all the memos when Michael already had one and the boxes sat at Kinko's

In the discussion (3)
Approx. transcript time · 01:03:50Read transcript
  • At first no personal nitpicks are offered because the film is so tightly constructed; the nit then raised is Arthur's generally creepy obsession with Anna, Merit Weaver's character (as transcribed), with sexual undertones that feel a little gross and are thankfully not explored further, unlike the old-New-York anecdote Arthur tells about a Chelsea brothel; the relationship gets used as a plot device at the end ('Are you telling me she's in the city?'), though the scene between Michael and Anna ('he really was crazy, wasn't he?') is a nice capstone on what Arthur meant to them both.
  • The car bomb needs walking through: how do the hitmen think a car bomb works, driving all the way upstate and waiting for Michael to have his cathartic meeting with the hit-and-run driver, when they could have blown up the car on the Lower East Side or at least in Westchester once he was leaving the state.
  • From the shared prep doc: Michael already has the memo when he goes out to the country, after the business of the Kinko's guy being asked to keep the memos for fifty bucks, copies that are very quickly obtained; so why did the killers need to steal or procure all the other memos, in a world that has email alongside the flip phones ('somewhere in this PDF, baby'); they probably never got all 25 boxes, which are presumably still at the Kinko's, prompting the joke of a car bomb at the Kinko's instead of a regular bomb.
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1:08:19

The Neil McCauley “A Book about Metals” Award for Best Line from the Movie

"Michael, I have great affection for you and you live a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man, not an ...

"Michael, I have great affection for you and you live a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man, not an attorney"; "Give me $50 worth"; "I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor"

In the discussion (4)
Approx. transcript time · 01:08:19Read transcript
  • Nominees read aloud: Michael's 'I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy' speech about having sold out Arthur for 80 grand; Arthur's 'you're a bag man, not an attorney'; Michael's 'There is no play here. There is no angle. There's no champagne room. I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor'; the $50 cab line mentioned before; and Arthur's 'I am Shiva the god of death'.
  • One pick is 'you live a very rich and interesting life', for the way the line comes out of Arthur while he is slipping, a man with baguettes who does not know what he is doing, imagined as Nicki Minaj saying it to Peter Rosenberg; another finds the last line simply perfect, the line identified earlier as the last line of the movie, 'Give me $50 worth' in the cab.
  • Asked for that line in a Denzel voice, the answer is again 'Absolutely not'. — Justin Charity
  • The retort is to democratize Denzel, since everyone can do Denzel; the third pick holds that the killer line is still 'I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor', a moment everybody comes to at some point in their lives.
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1:09:45

The Ruffalo / Hanna / Rubinek / Partridge Overacting Award

Dennis O'Hare

Dennis O'Hare

In the discussion (2)
Approx. transcript time · 01:09:45Read transcript
  • The overacting award goes to Dennis O'Hare for the Greer scene, especially all the lines about the guy jogging in the middle of the street at midnight, well deserved for how over the top he goes.
  • Flagged earlier during the Dion Waiters discussion as getting a different award.
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1:09:45

Who Won the Movie?

Tom Wilkinson or George Clooney (1-1 on distinct ballots; a further Wilkinson pick in 192-193 may be a third voice, w...

Tom Wilkinson or George Clooney (1-1 on distinct ballots; a further Wilkinson pick in 192-193 may be a third voice, which would make it 2-1 Wilkinson)

In the discussion (5)
Approx. transcript time · 01:09:45Read transcript
  • The field is narrowed to the actors themselves, Clooney, Wilkinson or Swinton, since Tony Gilroy has already received plenty of hosannas.
  • Wants to say Clooney, and does: part of the appeal is that he kind of lost too, embodying the film's sense of disappointment and loserdom in its afterlife, with both the movie and the performance underrated. — Lindsay Zoladz
  • Another answer is Wilkinson, with the film renamed Tom Wilkinson, Wilkinson on the posters and a franchise with Tom Wilkinson Too, not even the character Arthur but the actor.
  • Swinton's performance is called so potent that this is hard, but a further 'it's Wilkinson for me' follows, preposterously tight between the three; the transcript does not show whether this is the earlier Wilkinson voice or a third participant.
  • Swinton is the curveball: maybe not the winner, but the film might not work with Annette Bening as Karen, without the otherworldly, disorienting presence that keeps the whimsy going; 'you don't want the money' is called the best line delivery in the movie; styled and lit like a wax figure of a businesswoman, she plays the most normal person she has played in a long time yet is creepier for it, and nobody else would steal the scene and win the Oscar for it.
Podcast choices
Speaker not identified
Tom Wilkinson
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More from the conversation

Opening facts: released October 5, 2007, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, who had worked on blockbusters like Armageddon, written the first Bourne films and later directed The Bourne Legacy, directed the cult figure-skating rom-com Cutting Edge, wrote The Devil's Advocate and recently did rewriting and interior shooting on Rogue One; his heart lies in 1970s American cinema, but such films no longer make money, and Michael Clayton made 49 million despite Clooney; the poster sold a character nobody knew as a John Grisham-style one-lawyer story, while Gilroy's stated influences were muscular, ambiguous films like Parallax View, All the President's Men, Clute (as transcribed), Point Blank and the work of Lumet, Ashby, Frank Perry and Pollack.
Approx. transcript time · 00:00:24Read transcript
Plot summary: a mega law firm's fixer in hock to a loan shark over a restaurant that failed because of his brother's drug addiction, nursing a gambling problem, drawn into a case involving his mentor Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) and the agriculture conglomerate U North, which may be poisoning a small town with its pesticide; a story about greed, conspiracy, midlife crisis, addiction and failure; the tweet-length plot offered is 'the best mid-aughts post-9-11 movie about greed and corporations', and Michael Clayton is declared a vibe.
Approx. transcript time · 00:03:20Read transcript
Saw it the year it came out and had not rewatched it until last night; it is an amazing Trump-era movie about the futility of fighting a corrupt system, where going rogue does not matter on a cosmic scale, with a defeated sense that matches the politics of the last year and a half, and it is also a movie about complicity.
Approx. transcript time · 00:04:56Read transcript
The film looks at the law as an industry, the floating fixers at mega firms doing the dirty work on the margins of subpoenas and depositions, in a way no other film does; Clooney, who should be the Grisham or Mockingbird crusader, is instead a schmuck with a gambling addiction, a brother with a coke problem and a restaurant you should never go in on, trying to get an 80 grand gap loan from his boss Marty Bach; it only becomes a moral story after Arthur is murdered by hit men employed by U North, and even in the final confrontation it is unclear whether Michael will just take the money.
Approx. transcript time · 00:06:10Read transcript
Michael does not know what he will do until very late; the turning point comes when he throws his watch and wallet into the fire and fakes his death, about ten minutes before the end, and for most of the film he just seems annoyed about the Arthur situation and wishing it would go away; this may be a favorite Clooney performance precisely because he is not the righteous crusader but a sad sack who carries ten extra pounds, drives a leased Mercedes with a busted GPS and is constantly charging his phone.
Approx. transcript time · 00:08:07Read transcript
A recurring interrogation of Michael's occupation: cops think he is a lawyer, lawyers think he is a cop, Arthur calls him a bag man, he calls himself a janitor rather than a miracle worker, and 'then who are you?'; not a line is wasted; Michael is read as morally unmoored and dirtbag-adjacent, a Yossarian moving through a treacherous New York, seeking some moral bearing rather than trying to be a hero.
Approx. transcript time · 00:10:24Read transcript
So many characters break, especially Karen: biting her nails, sweaty, refusing eye contact, rehearsing her speech in the mirror intercut with the delivery, with a creepy blankness; she slides from Don Jeffries's competent right hand into tacitly approving multiple hits rather than directing Mr. Vern (as transcribed), negotiating on a night-time sidewalk as if choosing between U-Haul plans and unable to say more than 'I think okay'; the hosts disagree on whether age matters, one calling it a midlife-crisis film for both Karen and the 45-year-old Michael, who has glided on Clooney-esque charm, marking the start of middle-aged, Descendants-era Clooney after Ocean's 13; men like Marty Bach ('when did you become so fucking delicate') and Don Jeffries have crossed the River Styx and have clarity.
Approx. transcript time · 00:12:52Read transcript
Two poetic or opaque elements are raised in a film otherwise rooted in realism: Henry's game Realm and Conquer, which recurs and becomes a MacGuffin through the Red Book, and the opening monologue about being reborn in what sounds like a manic episode; Michael is also called kind of a bad dad, and his line about not being someone who wonders why shit keeps falling out of the sky is as much about himself as his brother, almost spoken into existence.
Approx. transcript time · 00:18:14Read transcript
Loves Henry the son: the car speech ('you're stronger than Timmy on his best day') is a dad talking to a young child like an adult, saying bullshit a bunch of times, and the connection shows; it is poignant because Michael is saying I am not good like you, you still have a chance, hopeful but filled with regret.
Approx. transcript time · 00:19:03Read transcript
Watched Michael Clayton for the first time two weeks ago (recency bias allowed) and rewatched it this past weekend; loved how the opening sequence is shot, lawyers near midnight with takeout and contracts negotiating a last-minute settlement while a Wall Street Journal reporter calls, which rings true from having worked in crisis communications, but found Arthur's speech overlaid on it jarring and hard to focus on the first time, in a way that makes sense in the film's broader scope.
Approx. transcript time · 00:20:49Read transcript
The opening montage, 2 a.m. with the phone lines lit up like a Christmas tree, is read as a monster uncoiling inside the skyscraper, with Arthur's voice articulating the insanity and the moral adjustments everyone in that room has made, even without knowing the extent of the U North crime.
Approx. transcript time · 00:22:19Read transcript
Asked what the horses mean, the reply is that it is like asking what the green light means in Great Gatsby; the deer scene in Three Billboards felt like low-rent Michael Clayton, trying for what Gilroy achieves here.
Approx. transcript time · 00:22:56Read transcript
The plausibility of the horses is waved off: they hit at the perfect moment, siren horses with no saddles, free the way Michael would like to be but is not; the Michael Clayton Tumblr and hashtag are recommended, especially the gif of the car exploding in the background with the horses in the foreground, inviting 'tag yourself' ('I'm the horses' / 'I'm the car').
Approx. transcript time · 00:24:05Read transcript
One participant avoided the film in the mid-aughts because the marketing made it look like George Clooney in a Law and Order movie, or The Rainmaker or A Time to Kill, Clooney versus an evil corporation, and felt betrayed by Siriana (as transcribed), a film they are obsessed with despite disliking it; Siriana is ruled not rewatchable, with a very rewatchable trailer containing the film's best five lines, the best being 'You're the Canadian'.
Approx. transcript time · 00:49:06Read transcript
Awards context: the film is still underrated, lost in the shuffle of a strong season; Clooney lost Best Actor inevitably to Daniel Day Lewis for There Will Be Blood, when in almost any other year this might have been the performance that won him the Oscar; it was nominated for picture, director, actor and supporting actor, Wilkinson losing to Javier Bardem, with Tilda Swinton the only winner; of the 2007 films, There Will Be Blood and No Country were recognized at the time while Zodiac and Michael Clayton were less lauded, all four have gone on to their own lives, No Country is now talked about least having had its Best Picture moment, and Zodiac's rising reputation is jokingly credited to one host's own Cambridge Analytica push.
Approx. transcript time · 00:55:56Read transcript
Is Michael Clayton more rewatchable than No Country or There Will Be Blood? Yes, agreed: those are capital-M moods that need planning, and standing plans to rewatch There Will Be Blood have stalled for six months, whereas this was watched twice in 24 hours, is on Netflix again, and is a put-it-on-a-loop movie a spouse wandered into every 23 minutes to say 'I love this scene'; because it is so dialogue driven, like A Few Good Men, you can dip in and out.
Approx. transcript time · 00:58:28Read transcript