Or–maybe a better post title–The Return of the Excellent Issue Film. Saw in theaters the superb Michael Clayton, which has a first half begun with a voice-over monologue by Tom Wilkinson and follows up with a pitch-perfect succession of rants, debates, and asides that struck me as the richest dialogue I’d heard at the movies in some time. The second half softens the impact, becomes more conventionally a conspiracy-of-corporate-malfeasance thriller, and the dialogue fades more into the background… but hoo boy does it roar when it begins. A shout-out for the egoless and yet compassionate portrayal of a corporate-lawyer baddie by Tilda Swinton: she turns what could be a cartoon villain, and potentially a misogynist depiction of the icy castrator, into a detailed and generous portrait of a complex woman as torn by divisions as the protagonist. Everyone in this is good, and the writing whistles, and the film races along–and comes to a conclusion that offers us the kind of meat-and-potatoes closure we want while also keeping us hungry, uncertain, concerned. It’s a damn good film.
Swinton is equally strong in the small wonder Stephanie Daley, about a young girl who hid her pregnancy and then either killed or suffered the loss of her infant at birth. Swinton is the psychologist grappling with her own pregnancy, a prior stillbirth, and confusions over her self and her relationship with husband Timothy Hutton. Amber Tamblyn is excellent as the accused young girl. For the first half, it felt too often like the winner of a short-story competition, all these carefully-drawn parallels between the protagonists, a slew of complications which felt like sincere issue-picture problems to be resolved (gender, power, choice)… but by the second half I was glued to the set and the emotional repercussions, underplayed and entirely earned, ripple out with no clear sense of closure or completion. I really dug this film, too.