One Perfect Moment

It might seem strange to consider Tony Gilroy’s “Michael Clayton” (2007) in conjunction with Wim Wenders’s “Perfect Days” (reviewed yesterday), even if, like me, the former is a movie you are thinking about all the time. “Perfect Days” is a contemplative drama in which nothing much happens. Indeed, nothing much happening is the point. It is a portrait of mindfulness, of a man, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), fully aware of and present in the moment, and how he seeks to remain that way each successive day. “Michael Clayton” is a fast-moving crime thriller with a jigsaw plot structure and an eponymous character (George Clooney), a law firm fixer, who is anything but mindful, his mind always churning instead, eternally on the clock, evinced in the opening scene’s early morning consultation. He is dealing with familial strife stemming from a deadbeat brother, and a bar business that went bust in part because of his deadbeat brother, and a mob debt on account of the bar business that went bust, and trying to wrangle one of his firm’s lawyers who has gone off the deep end, or maybe just come to see the light, making a case against his biggest client who, in a way, Michael starts making a case against too, all of which comes to a head during a fateful drive through the country roads of upstate New York in a car with a bomb wired to the GPS by two corporate hatchet men who are tailing him, or trying to, and trying to find the right moment to trigger the explosion. 

The contrasts extend further than the narrative too, and to the character, the performance, the framing. Hirayama is frequently seen alone in “Perfect Days,” but he is not alone, whether reading in his small apartment by lamp, or eating alone at a noodle bar, a picture of contentment. In images of Michael Clayton alone, on the other hand, he is the furthest thing from. When he’s sitting at a police precinct, waiting for the off-the-deep-end attorney he is struggling to corral, Clooney puts his chin on his hand, staring into space, and you can practically see his mind on everything. One of my three-hundred favorite moments in the whole movie is when Michael is in his office and on the phone with a client and says “Let me get a pen,” even though we can see he already has a pen in his hand, and as he momentarily lowers the phone, pretending to go find a pen, he comes across as a bone-weary man trying to steal a moment for himself in a world that won’t let him have it.

There is one moment ostensibly confounding moment in “Michael Clayton,” “the case of the three horses,” as a Roger Ebert Answer Man column put it the year of the movie’s release. This moment occurs at the climax, when Michael is driving around upstate New York, and suddenly pulls off to the side of the road, and gets out of his car, and ascends a small hill, all because he is riveted by the semi-surreal sight of three horses all on their lonesome in the early morning light. It’s true that Gilroy has planted little seeds in the narrative to make this make literal sense for the message board-styled critics, but it’s also true that you could not so much interpret this moment a thousand different ways as project what you think this moment means a thousand different ways, as Googling “Michael Clayton horses meaning” will attest. But a movie is only “exactly what is shows us,” as the esteemed Ebert also once noted, “and nothing more.” And what we have is an unmindful man who, for the first time all movie, becomes fully aware of the moment, and only the moment, and as his car going up in flames over his right shoulder illustrates, that newfound mindfulness saves his life. 

Perfect Days

Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) wakes every morning in his small Tokyo apartment naturally, no alarm clock, to the sound of a woman sweeping up outside, suggesting the sleep of the contented. He trims his salt and pepper moustache and steps outside, stopping to glance up at the sky before grabbing a canned coffee from a nearby vending machine and setting forth on his job cleaning public toilets across the wide expanse of the Japanese capital, evoked in the name emblazoned on the back of his blue uniform, The Tokyo Toilet. When he’s done for the day, he cleans up at a public bath, grabs dinner at the same subway noodle shop, and then settles in for the evening, reading, usually a classic, until he turns out the lights and goes to sleep, seeming to dream in half fragments of the day he’s just experienced, like he really does live 24 hours at a time.

These are Hirayama’s perfect days, in other words, and for an hour of this two-hour movie, this is essentially all it is, plotless, and defined by the smallest variations, slight changes in camera angles, a different cassette tape on his way to work, Van Morrison one day, Lou Reed another. At lunch in the same park each afternoon, from the same bench, Hirayama looks up at the trees, noting the cracks of light between swaying leaves, snapping a photo that he files away with the hundreds and hundreds of photos before, suggesting “Perfect Days” as a sort of cinematic version of Monet’s haystacks, intending to capture the small shifts in the everyday.

Initially, there is no drama, no real conflict, even his job, suggesting something unpleasant, features no more trouble than an annoying co-worker and a still-drunk salaryman stumbling for a place to relieve himself. Gradually, however, hiccups emerge. His annoying co-worker up and quits, leaving Hirayama to cover two shifts in one day. His niece shows up announced, leading her mother, his sister, to come find her, leading to brief, cold interaction hinting at familial drama. An interruption of a routine toward the end prompts Hirayama to buy beer and cigarettes, suggesting an addictive past. But that’s all these are, suggestions, as Wenders pointedly refuses to fill in blanks, never following up on these narrative strands and forgoing a voiceover that might have provided more clarity. That, however, is not the kind of clarity Wenders seeks.

Though Hirayama favors legacy acts on his musical cassette tapes, one artist he does not play is Bruce Springsteen, though I kept thinking of him anyway, and how his work in the 90s, both released and unreleased, is packed with his own variations of lines about slipping, or shedding, his skin. Hirayama has shed his skin too, and all these encounters signify fragments of the past he has left behind. And that’s where they remain, too. They do not alter his future, because in “Perfect Days,” there is no future, and there is no past, there is only now, a line he literally says at one point, which, for a minimalist movie, I honestly could have done without. And that only goes to show why “Perfect Days” requires no voiceover; whatever he says, would be redundant. 

What needs to be said is said in Hirayama’s face, in his expression, in his looking to the sky, in the way he cracks open his can of coffee, in the way he leans back at the noodle bar, so that you can practically see contentment wash across his face. More than merely a man sticking to his routine, “Perfect Days” is a portrait of mindfulness.