Michael Clayton (2007)

Anyone who’s ever had a corporate job and a conscience, this one’s for you.

I’m one of those people, and on my fourth watch the film still feels ethereal and mysterious to me. This time I figured out why it gets me: it sits with something I think about constantly, which is how to remain uncorrupted while actively working inside that machine.

It’s a movie about three people who’ve been corrupted by the underworld of American corporate culture, each at a different depth. Tilda Swinton’s Karen Crowder is all the way under and terrified the whole time, sweating through her blouse, rehearsing her talking points in the mirror, signing off on a murder. Tom Wilkinson’s Arthur Edens spent years defending a weedkiller that kills people, goes off his meds, and decides to atone. George Clooney’s Michael, the firm’s fixer, is waking up.

Tony Gilroy hides the movie’s conscience in a kid’s fantasy novel. Michael’s son Henry tells Arthur about a chapter of Realm & Conquest where heroes get summoned to their destiny: a whole bunch of people start having the same dream, none of them knows the others are having it, and every one of them thinks they’re going crazy. Arthur, off his meds and treated like a madman by everyone at his firm, asks a kid on the phone at 11 at night whether those people are crazy. Henry says no, it’s real. When Arthur says they aren’t ready to hear it, Henry tells him, “But later they will.”

I think the job is the sleep, and that dream is the summons. Gilroy opens the whole film on Arthur talking to Michael about the moment he froze in traffic on 6th Avenue, just out of the firm’s building, and felt coated in something. For a second he thinks he’s been reborn. Then he realizes he’s been covered in the firm’s filth for the best part of his life, and he tells Michael what he did with that clarity: he took a deep breath and tabled it. That’s what everyone in this movie does when they get a glimpse. Michael tells Arthur they’re janitors, they made their decisions. There’s some greater connection and beauty between us, the life we’ve built around our jobs keeps us from seeing it, and anyone who wakes up looks insane to the people still asleep.

Arthur leaves the waking up to Michael. After he dies, Michael finds Arthur’s copy of the book in the sealed apartment: that chapter highlighted and scribbled in, a drawing of horses on a hill, and tucked inside, the receipt for 3,000 copies of the memo he was killed over. The proof and the dream are in the same kid’s book.

Michael still tables it. He takes Marty’s money and signs the NDA. Then, at dawn, he pulls over and gets out of his car to look at three horses on a hill, the picture from Arthur’s book. He walks up to them, and the car he drives all night cleaning up other people’s messes blows up behind him. He lives because he stopped to look at something beautiful, and I think that’s him finally understanding the spiritual connection we all have, the one that had been lost from him.

It nails who the villain is: a memo, a settlement, a general counsel protecting the quarter, and two quiet men who do the work. Its relevancy has only increased with time. Arthur’s assassination is exactly what I picture when I think about Jeffrey Epstein’s supposed suicide: two professionals in an apartment, a short struggle that doesn’t leave a mark, a scene staged to look like a man who did it to himself, and a story everyone’s expected to accept by morning.

This movie works for me personally. It works on a story level, it works on a character level, and thematically it works on me more with every passing year and every rewatch.

Also on Letterboxd