Michael Clayton (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hours, color, 2007

Can you imagine what it would feel like to wake up one fine day and realize that the cause to which you have devoted enormous energy and commitment for many years, heart and soul, is just the opposite of what you had always assumed it was?  Here we have a man who thinks he has served a humane and noble purpose by pouring himself into the manufacture of a weed killer that allegedly will enrich the soil of thousands of failing farms across the nation and lift the fortunes of people struggling to survive, who discovers that the product is a deadly cancerous poison that will have just the opposite effect upon the ground in which it is planted.  Let us further imagine that this man is a bipolar individual who can only maintain emotional balance if he takes a stash of prescribed drugs on a daily basis.  Add this tenuous condition to the rude awakening and you have someone who while going off the meds becomes a walking dangerous liability to the company whose product he is supposed to be promoting, a person teetering on the edge of madness.  

Such a one is the pivotal character around whom this legal thriller is woven.  As played by Tom Wilkinson he lights quite a fire.  But the director Tony Gilroy introduces him in a most unconventional manner.  We hear him in voiceover for about the first three minutes or so of the footage.  He is spewing forth a mouthful of seemingly incoherent protestation, as the camera peruses the normal activity of the New York City law firm called UNorth, by which he is employed.  The sharp contrast between the apparently peaceful work scene and the demented rantings of Wilkinson is rather strange and unsettling.  What, we are inclined to wonder, is going on?  All on the surface is calm and civil while the voice we hear suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  The first hint we get that all is not rosy with UNorth is a phone call from a journalist picked up by one of the firm’s top flight lawyers Marty Bach (Sidney Pollack).  The unseen journalist is sniffing out rumors that the firm is about to merge with a British company, an inquiry Bach treats dismissively. 

The frantic words in voiceover are being addressed to a man named Michael. The message has been sent by phone or is about to be.  Presumably this Michael is someone attached to the firm, someone that the troubled man considers his only confidant, the only one who stands a chance of being a sympathetic listener to the outrageous tale he is trying to tell in his broken, disjointed speech.  It is not until a few minutes later that we learn who Michael is.  The name is Michael Clayton, the lead character that George Clooney is about to portray.  (Yes, the movie’s title is one and the same with the name of the lead man.)

Who is Clayton?  We meet him as he walks away from a poker game without finishing it.  He looks dejected and ill at ease, beaten, and within the following hour after he drives away in his car, an attempt is made on his life.  A flashback fills us in on why.  Clayton holds a law degree and was once a district attorney but has not practiced any law for some years.  Instead UNorth has used him as a “fixer”, someone who looks after the private lives of the law firm’s clients.  In plain, down-to-earth language he is hired to keep people out of trouble, to settle personal crises before they become the kind of major crises that could tarnish the name of the firm.  Clayton, who knows nothing about the fraudulent claims regarding the weed killer, UNorth’s product, has smarted under this job description, fixer, for years and has failed to be restored to the prestige of a practicing company attorney.  He calls himself a janitor.  

One thing that contributed to this status is his failure to make a success out of a project, once entered into with his brother, to erect a thriving restaurant business, the brother having turned out to be a self-destructive addict who ran the experiment into debt and sank it.  Clayton is still trying to sell off the property but having trouble getting a good offer.  He himself has a history of a gambling fixation.  So, no, our title character is not a heroic type.  He is kept where he is allegedly because he is good at cleaning up messes but has not yet proven capable of cleaning up his own.   

We learn that the frantic man we hear on the soundtrack is named Arthur, a recent middle-aged widower and an attorney who has unknowingly created the scandal that, as a matter of fact, has already surfaced in the form of a three billion dollar class action law suit.  Arthur is finally seen at the end of about the first half hour in Milwaukee hearing testimony, during which he does something obscene in public that is a major embarrassment to UNorth; he is arrested and of course Clayton is sent into the ring to bring the beast under control.  But Arthur soon becomes aware that Michael is not the sympathetic ear he has expected.  It seems that Arthur’s language about deception and cancer makes it impossible for Michael to understand what his friend is talking about.  When Arthur is murdered, the crime made to look like a drug overdose suicide, Michael’s suspicions are raised to such a height that he starts an investigation of his own and turns up some sordid documentation that gives shape to Arthur’s paranoid complaints.  This investigation puts Michael’s life in danger as well, hence the murder attempt already mentioned.  

Behind all this nefarious activity is none other than the chief counsel for UNorth, a high level woman named Karen Crowder, played brilliantly by Tilda Swinton.  (In fact, she won a Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance, one she rightly earned.)  Karen has a prodigious investment in the success of the firm, having climbed to the top tier over some years and still perfecting her bargaining and selling skills.  She almost singlehandedly has been put in charge of protecting the reputation of the supposed weed killing product.  She has lots of personal capital riding on the favorable outcome of the law suit leveraged against her firm.  She is not alone in the subterfuge; others collude with her, but she goes beyond even what they expect in hiring the assassins that plague Arthur and Michael.  

I like the way Gilroy directs her.  She does not come off as some sensuous personality using her seductive manner to hook her buyers, no guns blazing approach.  In fact, she is not very attractive at all.  She has other more subtle devices for beguiling the customers, and we get to see her in her solitary moments rehearsing her presentations; she comes across as clever but a bit tremulous.  In fact the first time we lay eyes on her she is in seclusion, half dressed and in a total nervous sweat.  

There is one other notable character in this drama, a grade school boy named Henry (Austin Williams), Michael’s son, a very sharp, curious and much read youngster who exerts a peculiar influence upon the nearly insane Arthur, a man he only talks to over the phone and never meets.  Henry seems to enjoy most of the time he spends with his divorced father when they are together.  The two of them have a very special moment when Michael makes his son aware of the gifts he possesses and urges him to keep excelling and to bypass the traps others in the family including himself have fallen into.  In a movie full of tough talk and ugly dealings and brazen encounters it is a warm and tender scene much to be savored.  I am so pleased that screenwriter Gilroy included it.  (Yes, Gilroy both wrote and directed.)   

“Michael Clayton” is one of the most powerful and penetrating screen dramas to show up over the past twenty years.  Released in 2007, I am just now reviewing it, because in that year this blog had not yet been set up; it would be five years later before I got started.  I have seen it several times studying its intricate plot structure and its brilliant interweave of personalities and its ever so insightful dialogue and its memorable encounters between the lead characters.  Nothing fanciful ever crops up in Director Gilroy’s devices; every move he makes is consistent in style and tone with every other.  The picture smolders; it never gets away from him.

The R rating is fitting; there are words spoken that you would not want your preschoolers or preteens to hear.  We are taken into a world that the decent ones among us would not want to visit for real, but it all shapes up into a morality play of Shakespearian quality.  It carries the echo of St. Paul’s reference to “evil in high places”.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Home Front by Kristin Hannah (Book Review by Bob Racine)

Published 2012 by St Martin’s Press 

The following quote is taken from the novel I am reviewing, an instance in which a mother is giving some sage advice to her twelve-year-old daughter, a mother who as a child herself experienced neglect and abuse and who endeavors to give the benefit of what hard times have taught her to her child: “One smile can matter.  Let people know you’re ready to be their friend, and if they give you a chance, take it—don’t be afraid. . .You never know when a sentence, a hello, can change your life.”  The girl is struggling with the emotional aftereffect of rejection and bullying dished out by some school mates of hers.  Not only are the words themselves sound instruction to be coming from a parent, but they take on extraordinary significance when they are read in the context of the book’s plot situation.  They are not being spoken in person, mother and daughter sitting side by side on a living room couch.  They are being transmitted to the child from halfway around the world.       

In “Home Front” we are taken into the life of an American family upon which the Iraq War delivers a stunning blow, only in this case it is not the father, the man of the family, who is snatched away for military service, but the mother.  

Jolene and Michael Zarkades are residents of Washington State, married for well over a decade, parents of two small girls, Betsy now twelve and Lulu now four.  From all appearances their lives are nothing out of the ordinary.  He is a successful trial lawyer in Seattle who commutes by ferry each day.  She is a trained helicopter pilot who belongs on a voluntary basis to the Army National Guard and always has since the two of them tied the marital knot. She thinks of hers as the best part time job on the planet.  The early morning hours of the day belong to her children.  The intervening hours are taken up in the air and she is there for them after school at the end of the day’s maneuvers.  Husband and wife have fallen into a very typical pattern: the father more wedded to his profession than to his family and the mother obliged to provide the discipline and order and nurture for the children. 

But all is not smooth sailing for them. The routine of their lives has become an irritant for Michael and his absorption in his work a growing irritant for Jolene, though most of the time she is in denial about it.  Their sex life has ground to a halt and intimate sharing is a seldom thing.  

The rickety domestic arrangement does apparently work—UNTIL the inception of the Iraq War.  Jolene finds herself deployed into the conflict and the convenient structure of their family life is decimated.   The only way left open to Jolene for providing guidance to her girls is through long distance e-mail letter, hence the exchange I earlier referred to.  Suddenly Michael is faced with the frightening prospect of becoming the sole parent on the premises.  He greets the news with disbelief and disorientation.  One sore point that this turn of events plays upon is his deep dislike not only of Jolene’s military connection but of the military crowd among whom she mingles on special occasions.  Her deployment forces him to face his dark resentments and to assume responsibilities at home that he never expected to shoulder.    

The author is Kristin Hannah, a writer with remarkable range and astute imagination.  This is the first of her novels I have read, but I am certain it will not be the last.  This fictional family is a challenge to both heart and mind right from the early pages and they take us on a journey of soul and spirit that will be difficult for me to forget however long I am fortunate enough to remain in this mortal body.  You look in vain to find the slightest wisp of soap anywhere in this narrative. You know you are in today’s real world – a world that is not always kind to the innocent or to the hard pressed working man or even to the committed energies of working mothers and a world that can be raw and brutal.  All the characters, including Mila, Michael’s mother, Tami, a longtime friend of Jolene’s, whom she met while in flight school and who gets deployed to Iraq with her, and Tami’s husband and son, who live next door, are fully alive and easily accessible.  

Hannah has superior knowledge of her characters; she knows what makes each of them tick, what drives them and how they size up and measure their world.  She never misses a single beat of any heart.  Not an angle or a tension or a fear is neglected.  It certainly could not have been an easy novel to compose.  The tempo of the tale is wonderfully strong and consistent

But nothing gets belabored.  Her sense of economy is faultless.  She knows how long to linger over a tumultuous scene and when to move on.  The story is told alternately from Michael’s and Jolene’s point of view.  The ordeal each goes through is portrayed in the most precise, agonizing terms.  And “ordeal” is not a figurative term in this case.  They are both purged through and through – purged of idols of the mind, of the remnants of their earlier innocence, of barriers long ago erected against growing pains, of rose-colored assessments of evil and good, and of defensive habits of thought and action that past grief and loss have engendered.  The rupture of their domestic arrangement is at times excruciating.  Neither one is ever the same again, especially after tragedy occurs.  The war leaves Jolene leveled in mind and body, after she loses a leg and has to sweat out the coma into which the crash of her helicopter leaves Tami, who is much more than just a friend.  She has for years been a staunch emotional buttress for Jolene, whose alcoholic parents died in a car crash when she was only seventeen, leaving her on her own.   

But the hardest readjustment of all is required of the kids.  What they go through really shakes the pillars loose. How do you explain to a preadolescent let alone a four-year-old why their mother, the woman who gave them birth and nursed them, who provided the sturdy shoulder to which they have always clung, must put herself in harm’s way for the expanse of a whole year?  Hannah does not skim over their emotional holocaust.  The way she depicts their crying spells drained me of tears at two or three points.  I am not sure how Hannah does it, but I almost believe I can hear them crying right off the page.  The dialogue she puts into their mouths transcends literary limitations.  Betsy goes into rebellion; Lulu is assaulted by all kinds of sensitive little girl fears; her whimpering is for real.  As I earlier pointed out, no soap was needed to drive things home.  The struggle of Michael as he copes with their needs tests him right down to the bottom layer of his being.  How does he go on with his professional life as a trial lawyer, supervising a whole law firm, and be present to his children’s needs and crises without the assistance of their mother?        

Actually it is his work as a defense lawyer that delivers a strangely ironic twist to his struggle.  It seems that his current major case has to do with the defense of a man in his twenties who is charged with the murder of his wife, a man who comes across at the beginning as remote and uncommunicative, but when he starts to talk Michael discovers that he is an Iraq War vet suffering from PTSD.   This opens a gigantic door of opportunity for Michael.  His involvement in the case affords Hannah the chance to air out the issue of postwar treatment of returning vets (but without usurping the place of the personal family crisis in the book) and gives Michael a handle on how to understand and minister to Jolene’s pathological state when she returns from the same War.  Hers is almost as dire as that of Michael’s defendant.  

If Jolene and Michael were a married couple of solid rapport with each other, if they were two people deeply committed to each other and to the sacred core of their marriage, that would have been a plus factor that would make a significant difference.  A deployed soldier needs to have strong backing from the family s/he leaves behind.  But it so happens that Michael, practically on the eve of her departure, presents Jolene with the news that he does not think he still loves her.  Can we begin to imagine what it would be like to depart for the battlefront with those words or words to that effect ringing in the wife/mother’s ears.  Jolene leaves for Iraq doubtful that her marriage can be saved, though she has to leave the girls with Michael, there being no other option and there being no opportunity for further discussion or counselling.  The Army will not wait.  Her spirit is half crippled before she ever gets going and it is this uncertainty that the readers of the book take with them on that journey, a shadow that looms.      

Yes, “Home Front” is a novel of pungent emotional effect, very demanding on the human heart; I got hooked very early and finished it in just a little over a week – something most out of the ordinary for this slow reader.  Without letting any spoilers escape from the bag just let me say that love and honesty do triumph.  

Very timely!  Most enthralling!

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.

Repast: The Testimony of the Loaves and Fishes (Poetry by Bob Racine)

The following poem is one I have been working on for quite some time.  I guess I have been timid about sharing it due to its bizarre nature and its strange language.  Much of the poetry I have written over the years, like this one, has been inspired by incidents in the New Testament.  But this one might take some getting used to, so I strongly suggest that you not stop with only one read-through.  Give it a second and maybe third reading in the hopes of it becoming clearer and/or more meaningful.  It covers more territory than at first may be apparent.                        

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know how my paltry life ceased,   

when I saved the day and the same day saved me. 

Millions of grains of cosmic truth assembled 

with five thousand I was to feed. 

A tough Prophet’s act to follow, yet I became 

the unwitting subject of abundance.  

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know where I’ve been, where I go,  

what I know, what I am –  

a progeny of soil and water, land and sea, 

grain and sperm, a fertilized egg  

in the ovum of a little known place. 

Before that day, 

mindless morsels in bondage to human appetite, 

mere loaves and fishes without even a pauper’s praise. 

This to remain, but for the grace of someone 

building a new Kingdom of Light.

Mark well the airtight refuge I took from him 

in a traveler’s pouch. 

Know, if you will, the field of force he unleashed,

laying siege to my cloister. 

I saw him not as he harvested

thousands of grains of truth in his teeth. The scandal of 

the man, the Prophet, the Kingdom Builder, 

the Truth Reaper, lost to me in my functional innocence.

The plentiful harvest, hands that labored in the ground, 

the plow that split the furrow –  

I was of the fruit they had borne.  And now 

a harvest in the making that would feed forever 

the sons and daughters of earth! 

A seed must fall into the ground and die to give birth.

I had sprung from its core, and only he who now 

stirred above me knew my worth – 

the Lord of the harvest yet to be.

I marked myself well –  

what I was – lackluster crumbs to sustain 

lackluster life, bartered for a peasant’s pittance, 

fated to be human refuse. 

What was I in my meagerness at such a 

cosmic renaissance?  Out of my element 

I awaited the sentence of human forgetfulness

And yet, of me he spoke, as of the seed that could move 

a mound of rock and return its abundance to the sower. 

I knew not that I was of such ancestry as had given the Word 

its flesh, such flesh and such Word as now shed its light 

upon the living and the dead.

Then into the void, as pebbles upon still water, there fell 

the murmurs of a milling crowd, the shuffling of feet 

uncertain of home and what somehow I knew to be 

the invisible soul’s longings laid bare 

amidst spectator hunger and ambivalence.  

And I heard my summons, 

the curl and crackle of the cloth about me, leaving me bare 

before air and soil and water and twilight chill and 

expectant throngs of humanity awaiting my pleasure. 

“Cover me!  Cover me!” I would have cried, but heaven

had not made me the gift of a voice, at other times 

so unenviable.

It mattered not.  I was spared from attrition 

by the Prophet’s genius stroke.  

Destiny marked the place, and I, if the attributes of 

flesh and blood  had yet become mine, would have known 

to call this repast by one of love’s many names, 

my then throbbing elements borne up in hands reaching

into heaven. 

This one who placed himself above the mollification of 

the mass mind, this healer out of the world, valued me 

above the genre of raw human necessity, made me a party 

to his compassion, to intangibles I would never perceive, 

tangibles to become reconciled with intangibles 

all about me.

For all this I was rendered immortal!

The five thousand, unmarked by destiny, nameless in 

their mass generality, not perceiving, partook of me, and 

began their mortal trek homeward.  They saw not that I then 

passed into history to witness in their stead 

last Passovers and betrayals, crucifixions and Eucharists, 

vow takings and idolatries of sacred covenants.

Mine is the miracle of odyssey, 

to be touched by more than I could ever touch, 

to bear no cross, only a sign read by some, 

of things taken in and recomposed to embellish 

the weak and the hollow,

of life in substance and fullness.

Mortification – ’tis beyond my simple extremity, 

yet now I tear apart, I scatter wide,

in tempo with hearts that break for disease and distress. 

Arms to embrace – they are denied me, yet now 

I delight to be dropped on mercy missions penetrating

the wide world.  To love and befriend, win or gain favor – 

such gifts outside my purview.  

Yet now nations call to me.  I confer with them 

across their dinner tables.

But for those in high places, draining

the oceans and granaries of the world, for those 

crazed in their gluttony, fouling nature’s nest and 

crippling my kindred, for the eat-meat-greet mobs, 

in their gusto mistaken for dedicated enclaves, 

I have nothing – no tears to weep.  I must defer to

the better breed of flesh and blood.  It is for them to 

cut a delicate path through callousness, extravagance, 

monopoly and greed.  I am otherwise enjoined 

by powers impervious to human loss and shall be, 

as long as Earth is a sovereign substance in living space.

Mark me well, name me not. 

Only know where I have been since that day, what I 

sew and reap evermore.  

I answer the squalling summons of hunger and need, but

I hunger no more myself.  Before soil and water and 

expectant throngs I move and germinate and wax 

mutely eloquent, no longer jealous of any act I must follow, 

favored to pass, in search of other multitudes, through 

all that stands or crawls, while prophets and peacemakers hold

my intangible worth in escrow for the millions yet unborn.  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.