Michael Clayton – Brilliant Movie

I loved this movie – It made me think and feel.

There are several truly poignant scenes in the movie, one of which is below, and if you click the link you will find an excellent review and analysis of it, “Mithraic Mysticism” and all.

I have to admit, I have moments of clarity (I believe it’s clarity, not insanity) JUST LIKE THIS:

We hear Arthur’s confession to Clayton during the film’s opening credits. What he describes sounds less like a psychotic break, and more like a Philip K. Dick-type visionary experience. After a lifetime of conscience-less litigation, Arthur realizes he himself has become an accomplice to mass murder:

I realize we’re standing in the middle of the street, the light’s changed, there’s this wall of traffic, serious traffic speeding towards us, and I freeze, I can’t move, and I’m suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I’m covered with some sort of film. It’s in my hair, my face… it’s like a glaze… like a coating, and… at first I thought, oh my god, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic – embryonic – fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve-I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn.

But then the traffic, the stampede, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I’m thinking no-no-no-no, reset, this is not rebirth, this is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death. And then I realize no-no-no, this is completely wrong because I look back at the building and I had the most stunning moment of clarity. I realized Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the… the-the-the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.