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
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.
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.
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.
