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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.

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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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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1:09:45

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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