Chewer Screenplay Analysis - An Ongoing Project

Would you rather do this on the main page?

I think some in-depth film discussion would be great on the front page.

I'd love to see this done as an article series as well.

I'm hoping to get to at least one of these this weekend and get back in here.

I haven't actually seen Michael Clayton, but I'm okay with that. I prefer to read scripts for films I don't already know anyway.

I'm not sure why you think the ending to Michael Clayton didn't work. It was my favorite part of the movie.

Michael pretty much gave up the life he had for years at the end of the movie by turning the girl into the police. When he got into the taxi and told the cabbie to "just drive", I thought it was a great metaphor because Michael didn't know where he was going at that point. He kinda gave up everything he knew/everything he was.

Very satisfying ending for me.

Cool idea Rath. Looking forward to reading your article.

I'm looking forward to the article as well. In depth movie discussions like that is why CHUD is the best movie site there is.

The ending of Clayton elevated the film to me, but I can totally see how you think that the tone is off from the rest of the film. I'm really interested in hearing what you have to say about it.

A friend of mine is reading the Up in the Air book as well - he found the movie far superior. He liked the movie a lot more then I did though; I thought that the screenplay was far weaker then the direction and performances that Reitman got out of his cast. Solid movie though.

I read Michael Clayton this afternoon. I'm going to give it another read-through for more detailed notes, but here are some initial impressions.

As I mentioned, I haven't seen the film. All I knew was two of the cast members, so I came into this pretty open, which was nice.

I had heard some things about Tony Gilroy's writing style, all of which turned out to be true. The man loves those double hyphens. They're everywhere, often multiple times within dialogue blocks.The opening speech:

It takes some getting used to. Another thing that took getting used to, but which I loved by the end, was his terse scene text. Lines like "Michael standing in the doorway" or "The car idling"; incomplete sentence fragments that are nothing but pure description. It's strange at first, but it makes the reading fly by.

On a technical screenwriting basis, he does a lot of things that new writers are told to never, ever do. He throws in camera directions, lots of sluglines, parenthetical notes in dialogue that refer to characters other than the one speaking...but I guess when you're Tony Gilroy, you can get away with that. I can overlook those.

One thing that always bothers me, though, is scene description that includes facts we can't see and will never know. Example:

There's really no point to a description like this. The audience will never see it, and it certainly isn't going to help the actor to know that. It's novel-writing creeping its way into a screenplay.

Again, none of this will end up on screen. It's curious to me that a writer with such a terse and quick style lingers on details that are untranslatable to the screen. These other characters don't speak, and are never mentioned by anyone else, and we certainly never hear about this bakery route.

On the creative front, I enjoyed the hell out of it. It's tense, and moves quickly. Unfortunately, I didn't feel that the ending was ever much in doubt, and Michael's come-around feels like it happens a little too quickly. But I'm still not positive that it was entirely for the right reasons, and I find that interesting.

As I said, I'm going to give it another read-through and come back to this.

Reading this thread again, it occurred to me that people might be confused why I just posted that in Rath's thread.

The initial post from the Would-Be Screenwriters Thread:

So that's why. Okay then.

Jeez, and I thought I was behind.

Read Up In the Air last night, and a couple things grab me. One is that Ryan's dialogue feels written with Clooney in mind (I'm assuming this is very near a final draft). Another is that there are virtually no physical descriptions of the characters-- detail is conveyed through impressions of their personalities. The scene descriptions are efficient and pithy, and convey that while the film isn't literally told from Ryan's POV, it is informed by it.

Officially, the 'hook' of the story comes when Ryan learns that his job firing people could become eliminated itself, but that comes a little late, almost a half-hour in. Really, what engages the viewer is his convincing pitch for the untethered life, complete with no-strings sex.

Regarding the ending, I think it's interesting that the film-as-made softens Natalie's exit as written, making it an endorsement of Ryan's "new beginning" line. If the finale is disappointing, it's because Ryan doesn't evolve-- if anything, he regresses after his fumbled flirtation with commitment, and there's no sense that he's aware of what that means for him. The deleted 'spaceman' sequence might have helped there, though it would have been difficult to pull off-- there's no setup for it, and it feels like a leftover element from an earlier draft.