Bridled

I've had a banner week for moviegoing, just last night saw the third one in seven days, Michael Clayton. It's a throwback, not just to the popular political dramas of the 1970's (photographed as if by Gordon Willis), but to that most endangered of species, the grown-up Hollywood drama.

It's the successful directing debut of screenwriter Tony Gilroy, starring George Clooney as a "fixer" for a top-rank Manhattan law firm who's come to the end of his rope. All the compromises he's made to try and make good money after early years of public service, years in the D.A.'s office that gave him the wealth of valuable contacts for which he was hired in the private sector, it's all swirling down a toilet of financial debt, compulsive gambling and conscience degradation.

While the movie is ostensibly about Michael Clayton's journey during three or four climactic days for his firm -- about to merge -- and their largest client -- a malignant chemical corporation wrapping up a critical class action lawsuit -- it is really about our times, specifically the moral turpitude of high capitalist power and profit, and that of its courtiers and bagmen.

I'll just skim over the recommendation elements -- Clooney is great, of course, in what will be seen as a signature roll, still my only real fashion icon; Tilda Swinton is spot-on as they say in the U.K. as the soul-sold corporate lever; Tom Wilkinson steals the movie with his voice alone in the opening credits, playing the Howard Beale roll and igniting the jackpot work crisis Michael has to fix to survive. And it's no accident that Sydney Pollack is on hand in one of his signature New York peak professional, this time Michael's boss at the big firm.

What made the movie feel right to me were certain thematic touches, certain patterns within the straightforward legal thriller plot that zips along at a pleasurable measure, elements of truth.

The most obvious one is the circular structure of the main body of the tale. Aside from providing the demanded pleasures of seemingly insignificant moments then clicking into place now, it feels like more of the trap Michael's built for himself these past few years, albeit coming to a head. Michael's in a cycle that can only lead downward, physicalized as the toll on Clooney's body.

Another was the vision of the major law firm pulling out all the stops on an all-nighter, all hands on deck in and around the boardroom, food and information flowing in, the important roads leading to Pollack. I spent a stretch of my youth temping in Manhattan at world class investment banks during the M&A era peppered with work on features. Gilroy does a great job of capturing the quality of the people, mainly young, buzzing through the office like a film unit the night before the first day of production. He gets the heat.

But my favorite moment is when Michael/Clooney has his moment with the horses, a modern movie hero desperately reaching out to this cinema cowboy roots. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? But in his second look, we see that the horses all are bridled, and he knows it.

This is the movie hero discovering a pack of wild mustangs on the mesa, only for our over-colonized 2007 and Michael's place in it, where there's no escaping the bridle. Not him in his world, not us in ours.

What minimal inspiration he receives is from these creatures, once wild in earlier generations, still beautiful, but no longer even trying to cast off the instrument of their harness.

Michael Clayton is about the cost of that bridle. To the horse.