Michael Clayton

Originally published on 22/11/23 on Letterboxd

“You’re so fucked”

All the more fitting that Sydney Pollack is in this because of how much it feels like the kind of film he might have made, during a time when this sort of brutal moral clarity and structural sparseness made the legal thriller a genre mainstay instead of something that gets dumped unceremoniously onto Amazon Prime. Notwithstanding how toBally bizarre this is at times, the element that holds together the film’s various digressions into prophetic visions of death and intrusions of the non-human is the fact that everyone in this looks like a living, breathing person, surrounded by crises and stresses that exist outside of the film’s sphere. Even someone as classically handsome as Clooney takes an air of the ineffably ordinary and unremarkable, his face often slumped into confusion or shock, not unlike the kind of role that Burt Lancaster might have played at one point.