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How does it feel? Footnote fetishism & “I’m Not There”

Jim Emerson

View image Franklin, Blanchett, Whishaw, Bale, Ledger, Gere: None of these characters is named “Bob” or “Dylan.”

Nobody’s life and work has been analyzed, interpreted, scrutinized for possible meanings and clues, quite like Bob Dylan’s. One key tale in Dylan’s history/mythology (though it’s reportedly true) is that of the hustler/stalker character known as The Scavenger, who regularly sifted through Dylan’s garbage looking for skeleton keys to What He Means, and eventually started interpreting himself into Dylan’s songs. Todd Haynes’ movie, “I’m Not There” (which played the New York Film Festival this week after premiering in Toronto, and opens wider in November) doesn’t intend to be any kind of Rosetta Stone for deciphering Dylan or his music. If anything, it applies further layers of imagery to the legend — deconstructing, reinterpreting and elaborating upon it at the same time.

So, what do you really need to know about Dylan in order to appreciate Haynes’ thrilling head-trip of a movie? As little as possible, probably — or as much as possible, or somewhere in-between. I’m no Dylanologist, but I loved it at first sight and, weeks later, I’m still loving remembering and thinking about it. True, I have all but four or five of Dylan’s albums from “Bob Dylan” (1962) to “Oh Mercy” (1989), and most of them again from “Time Out of Mind” (1997) through the Bootleg Series reissues and up to last year’s “Modern Times.” I worshipped “Blood on the Tracks” in college (still do), but I’ve never been as obsessive about him as many of his devotees (acolytes? disciples?).

View image Jim James of My Morning Jacket as a Rolling Thunder Revue-esque troubadour on Desolation Row in an old western town called Riddle in “I’m Not There.”

No particular Dylan knowledge is required here, yet I think “I’m Not There” encourages annotation, elaboration, imagination — not unlike like “Zodiac,” another of the year’s most fascinating movie. (See my random notes on that one here.) Still, it’s the experience of the movie itself that matters most, and that is most enjoyable. As Robert Sullivan writes in a fascinating but sometimes misguided, poorly edited and factually questionable New York Times Magazine story (“This Is (Not) A Bob Dylan Movie”):

“Haynes didn’t want to make a movie that was about anything. He wanted to make a movie that is something.”

That’s the best two-sentence description of “I’m Not There” I can imagine. But let me counter the article’s impression (or, at least, the sub-heads’) that this is a “weird” movie: “It Has to Be the Weirdest Movie of the Year.” No, it doesn’t. And it’s not. It isn’t even as odd or unfamiliar-feeling as Haynes’ “Poison” or “Safe” or “Velvet Goldmine,” and it doesn’t mean to be — although it’s obviously less linear than “Far From Heaven,” I’ll give you that. Yes, it casts six actors as different versions of the same central figure. But lots of movies (even “Ray” and “Walk the Line”) have done those kinds of things to show characters at various stages in their development. The only difference is that “I’m Not There” isn’t strictly chronological. It plays with phases in Dylan’s life, and public or private personae of his, but doesn’t cast them according to age, gender or race. What’s so terribly weird about that? (It’s certainly less unsettling than Luis Buñuel’s deliberately arbitrary and unpredictable casting of two actresses as one woman in “That Obscure Object of Desire.”)

I’ve been listening to Dylan a lot since I saw the movie, re-watching D.A. Pennebaker’s “Dont Look Back” and Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” reading liner notes and wading through the mixed-up confusion of Robert Shelton’s repetitive, contradictory, over-written and under-organized semi-authorized 1986 biography, “No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan.” I feel like watching Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (which is woven prominently into “I’m Not There”), one of my most-loved movies, but it always takes a heavy emotional toll on me, so I don’t know if I’m up to it right now.

Meanwhile, here are a few more things I’d like to scribble in the margins of Haynes’ movie for now, thoughts to tickle your fancy and to resonate in your mind while you’re watching “I’m Not There” (which I fervently hope you will).

Think of it as kind of Viewer’s Companion to the film:

At the most basic level, [Haynes] has tried to make a film with the power to carry you away, the power of a song, and what he is asking of the audience is to relinquish control, which is, of course, a huge gamble. “You have to give up a certain amount of control when you listen to music,” Haynes told me.

— Sullivan, NYT Magazine (October 7, 2007)

“The particular magic that Dylan has over, say, twenty million people, is the paradox and the inaccessibility of him. In his music, people are struck by something and yet they don’t really seem to know what it is. That’s always been the case with the most acute and exalted poetry. There are lines of Shakespeare like this, in which you don’t have to know who plays what to be struck by the magic of words. Then the insight of the listener is followed by intense perplexity. We hear something that we finally realize is saying something we think ourselves and then we want to know more about the writer who can tell us something about ourselves.”

— Richard Fariña, quoted from an interview with Shelton in his book “No Direction Home” (1986; republished 1997, 2003; p. 327)

“The amazing thing about Todd Haynes’s ceaselessly amazing ‘I’m Not There’ is how little nostalgia has to do with it. Just as Haynes used an obsolete style of melodrama to stir contemporary hearts with ‘Far From Heaven,’ he now deploys the life and legend of Bob Dylan to mediate a huge complex of ideas and feelings about the soul of the artist (or any feeling person) right now. Biography is only the vehicle; hagiography is the last thing on his mind. Haynes says more about the impact of Iraq on his psyche by reflecting it through Vietnam…”

— Nathan Lee, The Village Voice (September 25, 2007)

“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you in kind of some other place. It might make sense when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”

— Sullivan, NYT Magazine, Op. cit.

View image Highway 8 1/2 Revisited.

“The minute you try to grab hold of Dylan, he’s no longer where he was. He’s like a flame: If you try to hold him in your hand you’ll surely get burned. Dylan’s life of change and constant disappearances and constant transformations makes you yearn to hold him, and to nail him down. And that’s why his fan base is so obsessive, so desirous of finding the truth and the absolutes and the answers to him — things that Dylan will never provide and will only frustrate…. Dylan is difficult and mysterious and evasive and frustrating, and it only makes you identify with him all the more as he skirts identity.”

— Haynes, in preliminary Weinstein Company press notes for “I’m Not There”

“If a film were to exist in which the breadth and flux of a creative life could be experienced, a film that could open up as oppose to consolidating what we think we already know walking in, it could never be within the tidy arc of a master narrative. The structure of such a film would have to be a fractured one, with numerous openings and a multitude of voices, with its prime strategy being one of refraction, not condensation. Imagine a film splintered between seven separate faces — old men, young men, women, children — each standing in for spaces in a single life.”

— Haynes’ “I’m Not There” pitch to Dylan and his management, quoted in Sullivan, NYT Magazine, Op. cit.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (from “Leaves of Grass,” 1855)

The meaning of “articulate”

Jim Emerson

View image Forest Whitaker as Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.” The New York Times asks: Which Best Actor Oscar nominee is the bestest articulater: Whitaker or Peter O’Toole? (Answer: Neither.)

Senator Joseph Biden praised (or faintly damned) Senator Barack Obama last week by calling him “the first sort of mainstream African-American [presidential candidate], who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” OK, we know Jesse Jackson’s record isn’t exactly squeaky clean, what with the “Hymietown” and infidelity/paternity scandals and all. (I’m assuming that Biden was talking about the cleanliness of candidates’ public images, not their personal hygiene.) Shirley Chisolm, Elizabeth Dole, Hillary Clinton and Carol Moseley Braun are not guys. Al Sharpton is not all that mainstream (how many people outside New York know who he is?) and — at least when wearing a track suit — not particularly nice-looking.

View image Peter O’Toole in “Venus.”

So, that leaves Obama, who is male and partly African-American. (He was born in Hawaii to a black father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas). He may also be all those other things Biden said, but it was the “African-American” part and the “articulate” part that got Biden in the most trouble. Obama said he didn’t think Biden was making a subconscious racial slur. But as Lynette Clemetson wrote in a piece called “The Racial Politics of Speaking Well” in Sunday’s New York Times: “Being articulate must surely be a baseline requirement for a former president of The Harvard Law Review…. It would be more incredible, more of a phenomenon, to borrow two more of the senator’s puzzling words, if Mr. Obama were inarticulate.”

Good point. But if the former president of the Harvard Law Review cannot properly be described as “articulate,” then who can? Just because somebody has achieved a certain position in life does not necessarily mean that person is articulate (“Expressing oneself easily in clear and effective language: an articulate speaker.”). Clemetson notes that President Bush has also called Obama “articulate” — which reminds me of when Bush called the late Gerald Ford “decent” and “competent.” Mr. Bush went to Yale University (and is President of the United States of America) and yet he is about as articulate as Lindsay “Be Adequite” Lohan. Listen to him talk sometime. He appears to be painfully unaware of the meanings of the words he attempts to pronounce — especially, perhaps, “decent,” “competent” and “articulate.” (Some Disassembly Required.) From his mouth, those words sound like insults. Given his record and the way he speaks, what indication do we have that he understands them?

Don’t tell me you didn’t see this one coming

Jim Emerson

Dustin Hoffman doing a real Robert Evans impression in “Wag the Dog” (not at all like what Martin Landau did in “Entourage,” which could never be mistaken for Evans).

It’s enormously frustrating and stressful trying to live in three places at once, especially when they’re: 1) the “reality-based community”; 2) the arena of critical thinking; and 3) America in the 21st century. So, who was surprised by this headline?

Prosecutors drop case in Ramsey slaying

Prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Monday against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey, saying DNA tests failed to put him at the crime scene despite his insistence he sexually assaulted and strangled the 6-year-old beauty queen.

Just a week and a half after Karr’s arrest in Thailand was seen as a remarkable break in the sensational, decade-old case, prosecutors suggested in court papers that he was just a man with a twisted fascination with JonBenet who confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.

The only difference between this story and innumerable others (like, say the non-case for invading Iraq) is how quickly and easily it unravelled (or, rather, evaporated), after the press and the public suddenly realized they’d never had any good reason to accept it as legitimate in the first place.

“This is not HAL 9000…”

Jim Emerson

View image A motley group convenes at the Steak ‘n Shake after the opening night film to continue an annual Ebertfest tradition. The shot was e-mailed to Roger and Chaz within moments of being taken. (photo and foreground thumb by Jim Emerson)

Introducing “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” Sunday at Ebertfest, Roger Ebert used a laptop to speak for him. More about the festival in a few days (I’m still on the road and very busy), but if you want to see/hear a Quicktime video of Roger’s introduction (I took it with my Treo 680 from the third row, my customary place in the Virginia Theatre — usually in the third or fourth row next to my movie-mates David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (check out their Ebertfest blog coverage here), who are about to head off for New Zealand, you can play it by clicking here. It’s not great quality, but it plays just swell in Quicktime.

Opening Shots: ‘The Silence of the Lambs’

Jim Emerson

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From Mike Calia:

Bare tree branches set against an oppressive grey sky, meeting somewhere between impressionism and expressionism and setting the palate for the whole movie (save for the blaring reds and wood tones that pop up later in the institutional settings). Then the camera points down, almost straight down (setting up the well scenes in Buffalo Bill’s lair, as well), to the bottom of a hill, where Clarice Starling enters the frame and starts climbing and doesn’t stop for the rest of the movie. It’s part obstacle course, part fairy-tale woods, and not one frame is wasted. Add in Howard Shore’s haunting score (unjustly snubbed by the Academy that year) and you have the perfect blend of modern police procedural suspense and gothic horror.

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JE: Good one, Mike! This is such a deceptively simple beginning (and it takes you a little while to figure out what’s going on), but you’re absolutely right — it leaves you with a feeling, of Clarice running through the cold, hazy, wintry woods, that stays with you for the whole picture. (Demme is so unfussy and elegant.) There’s something about the starkness and emptiness of those titles — white outlines filled with black — that’s chillingly effective, too. And then there’s the way Clarice glances to the left — not behind her down the vertiginous path from whence she came, but off in another direction — before running out of the frame to the right. You get the feeling she’s running from something, perhaps something from the past about to pounce into the present, and she isn’t quite sure where it will come from.

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By the way, Dr. Lecter offers an excellent Socratic lesson in the principles of critical thinking here:

Dr. L: I’ve read the case files, have you? Everything you need to know to find him is right there in those pages.

Clarice: Then tell me how.

Dr. L: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius — of each particular thing ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice: He kills women.

Dr. L: No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice: Anger. Social acceptance. Sexual frustration —

Dr. L: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now…

Clarice: No. We just —

Dr. L: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?

Those words ought to be inscribed as an example in every classroom. See each thing for itself. Then consider its context. Understand how your enemy or adversary thinks. What may seem most important to you, may be only incidental to him…

Tell me a story… or don’t

Jim Emerson

View image Batman vs. Joker. How much story do you need? Is this movie going to have an unambiguously happy ending? What do you think?

“I’m a storyteller.” That’s the way many of the great old Hollywood directors used to like to describe what they did for a living. It was a way of being modest, but it also expressed their credo, which was that everything in the movie was meant to serve the story. We’re still used to thinking that way about movies, that they’re stories told with images and sounds. Sure they are. Sometimes.

I don’t mean to say that storytelling is overrated (then again, maybe that’s exactly what I mean), but we know it’s not necessarily the most important thing in a movie — even a mainstream studio picture. How it feels will always be more significant than the tale it spins. Because it’s a movie.

Some films, of course, are what they call “story-driven.” They keep you involved by teasing your curiosity about what will happen next. And it can be quite satisfying when all the narrative strands come together at the end in a nicely shaped bow (often culminating, in classical American cinema, by a wedding or a captured crook or a solved mystery or an underdog victory… or a kiss).

But how many movies really hold your interest just because of the story — especially in this season of formula superhero melodramas and romantic comedies? Don’t you already know, in your very bones by now, what the beats will be and basically where the picture is headed from the start?

My Cap’n, Dusty Cohl (1929 – 2008)

Jim Emerson

View image Cap’n Dusty Cohl aboard his Floating Film Festival in 2002: Larger than life, then as now. (photo by jim emerson)

Dusty Cohl was a tall man and an even taller character. Larger than life? Absolutely. And he made my life feel larger just knowing him.

Ten years ago, in February of 1998, I first met Dusty aboard his Floating Film Festival. An invitation had been extended to me via Roger Ebert to join the FFF as one of its critic-programmers. (I had the honor of presenting the world premiere of my best friend Julia Sweeney’s “God Said ‘Ha!'” that year, and will present her latest film monologue, “Letting Go of God,” aboard the FFF next month.) I didn’t quite know it at the time, but legend has it that Dusty and his wife Joan — who met most of the programmers (Roger, Richard and Mary Corliss, Kathleen Carroll) at the Cannes Film Festival in the 1970s — started the FFF after Cannes, and later the Toronto International Film Festival (which Dusty co-founded), got too big and too busy for them to see all their friends, including their fellow Torontonians George and Gail Anthony, Barry Avrich, Bill Ballard and so many others. The Floater was Dusty’s way of bringing them all together. On a boat. With movies. And food. And sun. And booze. And cigars. It was and always will be known as Dusty’s party.

View image Haskell Wexler photographs Dusty Cohl on the 2002 Floater. (photo by jim emerson)

My first year, I had just turned 40 and immediately became known to Dusty as “Kid.” I called him “Cap’n” forever afterwards. But as welcome and accepted as he and Joan made me feel from the get-go, I guess I found his outsized persona somewhat overwhelming or intimidating: I always seemed to be doing something exceptionally awkward (even for me) around him, like walking into walls or getting lost or sticking my foot in my mouth. Many people thought of him as a big kid, but to me he would always be a Big Kid.

Everybody wanted to please Dusty. His approval could light you up inside. My fellow FFF programmers and I noticed that Dusty’s smooth and potent blend (as in Crown Royal, the blended Canadian whiskey that was his favorite only drink) of brusqueness and warmth was perfectly expressed in the term he always used with us when signing off a communication — whether an e-mail or a phone call: “Lovesya.”

So long, Cap’n.

Lovesya.

(Please see Roger Ebert’s personal memories of Dusty — and more photos — here.)

Dead of (Election) Night: Terrifying tales of campaign narratives run amok!

Jim Emerson

Skeletons in the closet! Bats in the belfry! Wolves in sheep’s clothing! Pit bull-barracudas in Neiman Marcus clothing! Flying pigs in lipstick bursting forth from unlicensed plumbing fixtures! Befitting the sinister tone of season (political and scary), David Bordwell has published a brilliant essay he calls “It was a dark and stormy campaign,” in which he examines the concept of “narrative,” as it has come to be used in film and campaign circles. This is essential reading:

Clearly the presidential candidates have come to believe that what seizes the public aren’t just policy views and promises. Now the campaigns want to tell stories in which the candidates are the protagonists. The life of Barack Obama, or Joe Biden, or Sarah Palin is said to be a story (usually “an American story”). According to Robert Draper’s influential recent article [“The Making (and Remaking) of McCain”], John McCain’s campaign has deliberately set out a series of “narratives”: McCain endures suffering in Hanoi as a POW; he enters politics and fights for reform in government. Mark Salter, McCain’s staff member and coauthor, has the responsibility of stitching incidents of the Senator’s career into what he calls the “metanarrative” of McCain’s life–rather as George Lucas presides over the Bible of the “Star Wars” universe.

O, the absurdity! O, the ambiguity!

Jim Emerson

Wednesday, IMDb linked to my “Eleven Worst Ambiguous Movie Endings” post, and the comments from readers unfamiliar with the way we do things ’round here have been hilarious and disturbing. To spare embarrassment for those who seem to have unconsciously gotten the point even if they didn’t get the joke, I decided not to post a few of their comments, such as:

This article is dumb. Do you really, actually need all that stuff explicitly explained to you? Maybe you should stop watching movies–or at least stop writting [sic] about them.

and

Opening Shots: ‘Scarecrow’

Jim Emerson

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From Leonard Maltin:

The one that first comes to mind is from a film I fell in love with thirty-some years ago, “Scarecrow,” directed by Jerry Schatzberg and shot by Vilmos Zsigmond. I revisited it when it finally came to DVD last year and felt exactly the same way. It opens on a static shot of a wood and wire fence alongside a two-lane highway, as a figure makes his way down a hill toward the fence (and us)…the sky is gray behind him. We’re riveted to this image, eager to find out who this is, where he’s coming from, and where he’s headed. I haven’t timed it to see how long the shot actually runs, but it’s long, and absolutely mesmerizing: an opening shot that draws you in and makes you want to watch the movie.

JE: Thanks, Leonard — it’s a beauty! The dark gray clouds contrasting with the pale tan of the dry, grassy slope; the light playing across the hillside that makes the clouds shift even darker; the sound of thunder echoing in the distance — it’s the kind of shot where, seconds into the movie, you can almost smell the setting: The ionic scent of the approaching rain, the dusty pollenated aroma of the baked grass. And it’s also funny, as Gene Hackman attempts to extricate himself from the fence. Anyone who’s attempted to climb over, under or through barbed wire knows the pain and frustration of this moment all too well! It looks like the shot was originally even longer, and is interrupted by a few cutaways to Al Pacino watching from behind a tree — perhaps to substitute different takes. And you’re right: Now I’m going to watch the whole movie. (Love Pacino’s introduction: “Hi. I’m Francis.”)

Incepción… starring Dora the Explorer

Jim Emerson

The movie’s muse explains it all for you! Very good!

(tip: Vulture, Michael Phillips)

George Lucas: Low-Budget Eye-Candy

Jim Emerson

LOW BUDGET EYE CANDY #1 from Steven Boone on Vimeo.

Yes, there was a time when it seemed George Lucas might become more of a director than an entrepreneur. Steven Boone of Big Media Vandalism analyzes one neck-snapping action sequence from Lucas’s first (and most adult) feature, 1971’s “THX-1138,” in this terrific video essay, hosted at Vinyl Is Heavy. “Low-Budget Eye-Candy” showcases a precise but unfussy directorial style that grasps “the subtleties of true film craft… and the power of its simplest tools.” Here’s evidence that a pursuit sequence (OK, a car chase) doesn’t have to cost loads of money, or resort to frenetic cutting and camera placement, to create excitement. Writes Boone: “Post 1970’s, post-MTV, post-AVID, post-Internet, post-DVD, this is what mainstream American cinema has lost.”

The Big Kahuna Gets Lai’d

Jim Emerson

View image Jonah Hill, Mila Kunis, Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand — happy to see them all!

My review of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is in the Chicago Sun-Times and on RogerEbert.com. (Also: “My Blueberry Nights” and “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?.”) Here’s an excerpt:

Jason Segel’s penis probably would not sell a lot of tickets all by itself. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, but most of us don’t think of the co-star of “Freaks and Geeks,” “Knocked Up” and “How I Met Your Mother” in that way. As wise men (and women) always point out, it’s not the thing itself that matters, it’s what you do with it. And what Segel does with it as star and writer of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is magnificent. Between his brief nude scene at the very beginning (a humiliating, emotionally naked break-up and breakdown), and his even briefer final one (a welcome reunion of sorts), he discovers quite a lot about himself through his genitalia. […]

… Segel’s script [is] a mash-up of “10,” “Modern Romance” and “Better Off Dead…,” no doubt enlivened by spontaneous invention on the set. Remember Brian Dennehy as the nurturing bear of a bartender who looks after Dudley Moore in his hours of alcoholic sexual desperation? Here that role is split into two massive resort workers and one laidback beach dude, and they’re all funny in their own ways. But there’s also a real-world twist: One of the guys with whom Segel feels a vacation-connection turns out to be flying on autopilot, just doing his job the best he can. Not with malicious intent — it’s just his personality, which is probably what got him hired in the first place….

TIFF 2007: Madmen and lawyers

Jim Emerson

View image He’s mad as hell…

Tom Wilkinson has probably won an Oscar nomination for supporting actor in “Michael Clayton” before he ever appears on the screen. Or he should, anyway. But then, he should also be competing with (just to mention some of the other supporting male performances I’ve seen in Toronto thus far) the likes of Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook and especially Brian Dierker in “Into the Wild”; Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem in “No Country for Old Men” (or are those leading actor performances?); Armin Mueller Stahl and Jerzy Skolimowski (!) in “Eastern Promises”; and definitely Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton”…

Now, I am not one of those people who come to Toronto for Oscar-spotting purposes. But “Michael Clayton,” written and directed by “Bourne” series screenwriter Tony Gilroy, is the kind of smart, crisp, “serious” mainstream entertainment that gives Hollywood (or the part of it influenced by George Clooney) a good name. I guess you could describe it as a Manhattan “legal thriller” — most of the main characters are corporate lawyers — that strikes a delicate tonal balance between the cynical political paranoia of the “Bourne” movies, the satirical paranoia of “Network,” the corporate paranoia of “The Insider,” and the legalistic paranoia of “Erin Brockovich.” And, as in all these movies, when you’re feeling paranoid, it doesn’t mean somebody isn’t out to get you.

Wilkinson finds that perfect chord, and establishes the tone of the movie, in his off-screen opening monologue, a breathless rant of a voice message left for his fellow attorney, the eponymous Michael Clayton (Clooney), the firm’s “fixer” who is called in to take care of delicate “problems” for a rich and powerful clientele. Wilkinson’s character, Arthur Edens, is a brilliant lawyer who’s been working for more than a decade on a single case, involving a chemical manufacturer that, after the usual cost-benefit analysis, released an agricultural product with toxic effects on humans. (The company’s earth-friendly TV spots will look painfully familiar to PBS viewers, where such underwriting entities are expert at peddling their green corporate citizenship.)

Arthur is also manic-depressive, and he’s gone off his meds, and he’s raving about the moment of clarity he’s having about the dirty, soul-killing business he’s in. He’s like Peter Finch in “Network,” only his volcanic monologues aren’t quite so messianic. (But then, he’s not working from a Paddy Chayevsky script, either. Actually, I think “Network” would have been a better movie if it had been written and directed more in the style of “Michael Clayton.” That is, a bit more dryly.)

View image Clooney and Pollack: These guys are good. Really good.

The movie revolves around the title character’s face, and its hard to think of another actor who could hold it together the way Clooney does. His eyes reveal a quicksilver intelligence — always sizing up the situation, figuring out how best to play it, even when he’s utterly lost — that Clooney can do without looking like he’s trying. He doesn’t give things away, he just registers enough to for you to notice without noticing that you’re noticing. And that’s a considerable accomplishment (especially when you remember how broadly, goofily dumb he can also play with supreme confidence, as in the Coens’ “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”). Equally adept, and really fun to watch, is Tilda Swinton as an ambitious corporate climber, who rehearses her every statement while nervously trying on the appropriate uniform for each boardroom crisis. (Look for Ken Howard and Miles O’Keefe in surprising roles as professional office politicians.)

And there’s ever-reliable Sydney Pollack, who has become one of my favorite character actors (“Husbands and Wives,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” “The Sopranos”). The man is a consummate actor, so effortlessly natural he can make others look mannered next to him. That makes him the ideal foil for the comparably relaxed style of Clooney, and their scenes together are especially fun to watch. They also provide Wilkinson with something solid that he can bounce his wild, unpredictable serves off of. (I feel about Pollack the opposite of how I feel about Sean Penn: the former is a better actor than a director, and with the latter it’s the other way around. Pollack is a producer on the film — and Clooney, Steven Soderbergh and Anthony Minghella among the executive producers — and I mean no slight when I say I found myself grateful that they decided to let, or enable, somebody else to direct this one.)

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Gilroy does just fine in his directorial debut. His style suits his actors (and, for that matter, his leading characters): handsome, smart, economical. Three of the last four shots in the film (number three is simply a bridge between two and four) are quiet stunners, though I would have cut to black about two or three seconds earlier at the end. The first of these final shots sums up the virtues of the film ideally: While quite naturally following the trajectory of one character in the foreground, the fate of another is captured in the same frame, but out of focus and in the receding background. It’s another perfect note, and it’s handled so deftly you could almost miss it. You won’t, though — and the great thing is you’ll feel like you discovered it yourself. Along with everybody else in the audience.