Thank the Academy?

National Review, March 10, 2008 by Ross Douthat

THE writers' strike is settled, the picketing scribes have dispersed to their keyboards, and if the stars feel any pangs of social conscience while strolling the red carpet they'll have only their fuel-guzzling, globe-warming private jets to blame. The Oscars, in other words, will go on as usual--and for the second year in a row, your faithful critic is playing catch-up, having failed to review three of the Best Picture nominees until now.

Inevitably, the Academy and I don't quite see eye to eye. If I were picking a suspense film for the final five, for instance, I would take Eastern Promises or Zodiac over Michael Clayton, a George Clooney vehicle that's torn between two genres--the lawsuit drama and the paranoid thriller--that are ultimately mutually exclusive. In the lawsuit movie, some noble soul--a crusading lawyer, a conscience-stricken corporate drone--leads the charge for justice against a wicked corporation, with briefs and motions flying. (Think The Insider, or Erin Brockovich.) In a paranoid thriller, the justice system offers no relief, because whatever evil there is goes all the way to the top. (Think The Parallax View, or the recent Bourne trilogy.) The lawsuit movie is realistic, if tendentious; the paranoid thriller is fantastic. The lawsuit movie is liberal; the paranoid thriller is radical.

Michael Clayton's plot starts out as straightforward lawsuit-movie fare. Our hero, Clooney's Clayton, is a fixer at a high-priced New York law firm, deep in debt and up to his eyes in cynicism. He's called in to deal with one of his colleagues--Tom Wilkinson, gobbling the scenery and demanding seconds--who's gone off his medication and around the bend. Except that Wilkinson's character claims to be enjoying a rare moment of clarity, in which the true horror of their line of work has been revealed to him-and in particular, the wickedness of defending a chemical conglomerate named U/North, which has sowed the soil around a farming community with poisoned fertilizer.

No doubt you can see where this is going: The fixer, Clayton, will gradually rediscover his conscience and take the plaintiffs' side against his own employers, setting aside financial and professional temptations in order to Do the Right Thing. It's a predictable story, but the movie tells it well enough: The dialogue is terse, coarse, and bitten-off; Clooney is as magnetic as ever; and there's fine supporting work from Tilda Swinton, as the high-strung U/North legal counsel, and Sydney Pollack, as Clayton's shark of a boss. The visual mood is just right, juxtaposing the depressing, fluorescent sheen of its corporate interiors with wintry, burnt-out cityscapes and countrysides, as though U/North's toxins had drained all the color from the world.

But Michael Clayton can't leave well enough alone. It wants to generate more suspense than a legal drama can, and the means it uses--a hard-to-swallow second-act murder, a risible third-act car bombing--belong to a different kind of story entirely, one that asks us to suspend our disbelief from the beginning instead of springing wild implausibilities on us midway through.

If Clayton goes wrong because it doesn't know what sort of movie it's supposed to be, then Joe Wright's Atonement has the opposite problem. It knows exactly what it wants to do--adapt prestigious novel set in 1930s Europe, add water, and win Oscar--and never manages to become anything more than that. Atonement has everything an Anglophile could want: romance and intrigue in an English country house, courage under fire in a Blitz-blasted London, fabulous costumes, passionate encounters, shocking betrayals, a sweeping score. Moment to moment, the film can be quite wonderful, particularly in the scenes that don't require much from Keira Knightley, stick-thin and typically underwhelming as one of the story's star-crossed lovers. But all the great moments don't add up to a great film: It's telling that the movie's finest cinematic achievement, a stunning five-minute tracking shot across the chaos of Dunkirk, could have been stripped out of the movie without altering the story a whit.

Part of the problem is the source material. Ian McEwan's novel is brilliant but overly self-conscious, so aware of itself as a fiction that it never swallows the reader whole. Wright's too-faithful adaptation throws the story's weaknesses into sharp relief. It's a series of free-floating World War II-era set pieces rather than a gripping and coherent yarn.

Despite their faults, though, both Atonement and Michael Clayton aren't grit-your-teeth disasters of the sort that the Academy occasionally sees fit to honor. Twenty minutes in, I feared that Juno, a sleeper hit in which a dry-witted Minnesota teen named Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) finds herself unexpectedly pregnant, might be such a debacle. It was written by one Diablo Cody, a former stripper, and the movie's opening act lives up to its hyper-ironic pedigree, with a flurry of sight gags--a Sunny-D-chugging march to the convenience store to buy a pregnancy test, a phone call to an abortion clinic from a hamburger phone--and dreadfully knowing dialogue, from the convenience-store clerk who remarks, "This is one doodle that can't be undid, home-skillet" to Juno's best friend Leah, whose response to the big news starts with "honest-to-blog?" and ends with "Phuket, Thailand!"