The Throwback Thriller

Just when I thought le mode retro was dead, it's reappeared again with Michael Clayton--well, sort of. Both Manohla Dargis and Michael Phillips note that Tony Gilroy's film is a "throwback thriller" reminiscent of 1970's Hollywood studio products, which is new ground in film nostalgia. Quentin Tarantino has made a career of recycling fringe '70's b-movies, and every time an American director makes a well-crafted, artistically ambitious film without the standard indie slacker tropes, critics wistfully invoke Francis Ford Coppola circa The Conversation. But this is the first time that I can recall newspaper critics longing for the mainstream studio products of that time, when Hollywood sold its soul to Luke Skywalker.

True to the film's retro '70's feel, film's visual style is a sort of second reflection film noir--modishly black, but in the style of late-model Mercedes sedans rather than downtown hipsters. The cinematography extrapolates George Clooney's five o'clock shadow into a visual metaphor for the social and economic rewards of bad faith.

In an ethical world hard-wired to preserve the status quo, there's a sudden outburst of unreason as an attorney performs a berserk parody of a legal drama, thereby threatening to blow up a multi-billion dollar lawsuit. Enter the title character to tap everything back down, to re-establish reason.  Unfortunately, Michael failed to resolve his class and Oedipal conflicts when New Yorkers are supposed to--in law school--so he can't do his usual cleanup job.

George Clooney has constructed his star persona so that his every appearance is a political allegory of one kind or another--when everyone else in Hollywood putts around in Priuses, Clooney has ordered a $100,000 electric car--so it's tempting to see Michael Clayton, along with another noirish throwback, The Good German, as Seventies-style allegories of the moral hangovers after long wars, both good and bad. Maybe now is the time for Coppola to make a comeback with a legal thriller with an Ad Reinhardt palate starring George Clooney as a Justice Department attorney who's come across a pile of memos authorizing torture. Tilda Swinton can reprise her Michael Clayton role as the frigid right wing zealot who tries to block him, and Gene Hackman can play the Sidney Lumet role. They can call it The Email Thread.