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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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')
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.
