Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Michael Clayton
Directed by Tony Gilroy
B+
Reviewed by Sean Burns
Opens Fri., Oct. 5

Thirty years ago a movie like Tony Gilroy's taut, no-nonsense thriller would've been a summer blockbuster. But such is the state of cinema these days that something this intelligent must be released gingerly, as if it were some sort of art film.

Another hit in exec producer George Clooney's recent run of politically savvy pictures, Michael Clayton provides the Cloonster with his meatiest role yet, as a slick fixer for a massive Manhattan law firm--the kind of smiling, shadowy figure who works behind the scenes and cleans up the mess before it makes the papers.

But when an esteemed colleague (the terrific Tom Wilkinson) goes off his meds, grows a conscience and threatens to botch a massive class-action suit regarding a carcinogen-laced weed-killing spray, Clayton finds his loyalties tested, and for the first time starts wondering how he let himself become a smooth-talking janitor for the powerful. Sydney Pollack, proving once again he's a better actor than a director, heads the firm and has no patience for all this soul searching. Pollack has what might be the only bellow in Hollywood that's deeper and more authoritative than Clooney's, and I'd be content watching these two chew each other out for an entire picture.

A smart movie about smart people talking in circles around one another, Michael Clayton doesn't need explosions (well, there's one) or shootouts to ramp up the tension. Gilroy, who makes his directorial debut after a career spent penning grownup thrillers like Proof of Life and the Bourne series, has a sparse, clean visual style, with Robert Elswit's sharp photography lending a steely sheen to the cool-as-a-cucumber proceedings.

But it's all Clooney's show. One could make the case that he's just playing a thinner, better-dressed version of his disillusioned Syriana character, but if somebody's this good at something, why complain? There's a wonderful, deftly underplayed weariness behind even Clayton's most gregarious back slapping. He's a crummy father and he's drowning in debt, the kind of guy who sacrificed everything for his career and realized too late it was a bum deal. There's a reason the movie's closing credits run alongside a minutes-long close-up of Clooney. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star.

Quietly and unassumingly, Larry Fessenden has spent the last two decades trying to transform the horror genre.

Horror, like any disreputable genre, has always been a reliable conduit for exploring ideas and themes mainstream cinema doesn't like to deal with. But Fessenden's films don't mess with subtext, making it impossible to miss, for instance, that The Last Winter is about the havoc mankind wreaks upon the planet earth. Take The 11th Hour and An Inconvenient Truth and rework them as a modestly budgeted horror pic, and it might look something like this.

Shanghai fights: Wei Tang (center) resists the Japanese occupation in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution.

In a nod to both Howard Hawks and John Carpenter's versions of The Thing, The Last Winter sets us and its impressive indie/B-movie cast at a base in the Arctic tundra, where an oil company's drill seems to have awakened some spectral (and barely seen) CGI beasties under the frozen surface. Meanwhile no-nonsense corporate dickhead Ron Perlman comes to blows with environmental consultant James LeGros, stationed there for some serious tongue-clicking. Subtle, no?

But if Fessenden's agenda is never less than obvious, his execution is the opposite--we never know exactly how the menace will manifest. Fessenden is careful not to give the game away too early, making the fear of the unknown at least as terrifying as whatever this unknown turns out to be. Surely this is one of the few horror films where most of the cast is killed off not by some monster but by insanity, whether it be their own or someone else's.

Shot in 'Scope, Winter likes to surround its characters with darkness by night and pure whiteness by day. (One incredible shot is nothing but white with tiny specks of characters wandering around in the middle, lost in a vacuum.)

And I do mean "characters." Fessenden, a sometime actor himself (he's one those damn dirty punks in The Brave One), has always encouraged strong acting, and the cast (which also includes Connie Britton and Kevin Corrigan) exudes a Hawksian chemistry that makes the film's prolonged slow buildup all the more affecting.

Who could've guessed that between the two movies released this year about resistance fighters knocking bedposts with the enemy--one by the ever-tasteful Ang Lee and the other by world-class perv Paul Verhoeven--the one to score an NC-17 rating would be Lee's? In its heart of hearts, Verhoeven's WWII-era Black Book is the naughtier movie (read: pube dyeing as a plot point). But Lee's is still the one with a shot of Tony Leung's nut sac, plus more than a couple vigorous flips through the Kama Sutra.

The film's homeland of China predictably sliced out the steamier parts from Lee's latest, namely the headline-grabbing stumping sessions between spellbinding newcomer Tang Wei, as a resistance fighter in Japan-occupied Shanghai during the '40s, and Leung as her target--the much-feared head of the secret police.

But please be patient: Lust, Caution doesn't let its leads paw at each other till an hour of its 155-minute running time is left. Until then, we watch Wei enter the resistance, first with a troupe of collegiate actors clearly in way over their heads. Their target is Leung, whom Wei--the smartest and of course hottest of the group--is to seduce and destroy. A cock-up and a gruesome murder put things on hold for three years, at which point Wei has been enlisted by the bigger resistance to try once more, with feeling.