ON CIRCUIT: Tarantino’s Death Proof, Michael Clayton and Halle Berry in Things We Lost in the Fire.
Death Proof
Quentin Tarantino’s loving revisioning of 1970s ‘grindhouse” trash has a lot of beautifully contrived scratches on the film but not much content. Basically, it’s a rape fantasy in which Kurt Russell mangles and destroys women with his car, a substitute penis, as battering ram. Splat, scream, splat. And then, to up the fun, Tarantino gives us women turning on the killer and beating him to a pulp. In between, for what seems like hours, the women engage in the kind of fake jive-ass banter Tarantino used to give his male leads (and it was so much better when Roger Avary was co-scripting), but that’s just to get us to the next piece of stylised sadism. Mostly it’s very dull, and the rest is unpleasantly ugly. — Shaun de Waal
Michael Clayton
George Clooney comes unprecedentedly near to playing a damaged man, a weak man, a defeated man, in this corporate-legal thriller, which comes swathed in a fur of anxiety and shame. It’s an arresting performance nonetheless: muscular and pain-racked at once. Tony Gilroy, who scripted the Bourne movies, writes and directs, and Clooney plays Michael Clayton, a ‘fixer” in a top-notch New York City law firm; his street smarts and cop contacts have over the years made him invaluable at discreetly clearing up the firm’s embarrassing messes. But social class and taboo have ensured that he has never been considered good enough to be made a partner. As Clayton approaches middle age with a failed marriage and stalled career, this personal slight has been eating him up and he has taken solace in playing poker against people with deeper pockets than his. The movie is not so much a paranoia thriller, more a character study — albeit obliquely rendered — showing the corrosive effect of years of swallowed disappointment. — Peter Bradshaw