U-North Toxicity and the Salvation of Wild Horses

Michael Clayton is one conflicted dude. On one hand, he requires a bit of under-the-table corporate sponsorship (to the tune of $75,000) to bail out his drug addicted brother. On the other, he is faced with a difficult moral challenge when a friend and personal colleague is stricken by a deep personal desire to free himself from an inescapable "film" of toxicity that he feels has saturated into the core of his very being. That Michael's escape from the shady corporate operatives dispatched to destroy him comes in the form of several stray horses is indicative of the filmmaker's message that only through an embrace of the natural world can we escape the rigors of those who seek to destroy it. The Toxic Disturbances that Tom Wilkinson's Eden experiences work to reinforce this theme. Eden's name is, of course, a biblical allusion to that special virginal garden where original sin first corrupted humankind. Eden too is corrupted. His job has forced him to help conceal the ill-effects of a destructive, potentially deadly chemical called Calcitrate, to the point that he is named the "architect of the defense" for the corperation. This is a battle against the environment as well as humanity that has sapped some 12 yrs of Eden's life. Any of us would crack under such pressure. In this way, the most seemingly insane person in the film is the film's moral center. With a childlike interest in books (specifically the red-bound tome where curiously the horses that save Clayton on the hillside actually appear (go back and check it out if you don't believe me)) and other non-destructive interests, Eden is a suit with a heart. Unlike Syndey Pollack's character, the complacent corporate giant, he is disgusted by the offenses he has created, indeed slaved over, protecting the guilty. This is his ultimate undoing. Yet the movie reminds us that this murder did not occur in vain. Clayton provides Eden's vindication when he topples Tilda Swinton's character, who is both a PR machine and a murder-contractor, with the help of his handy detective brother. It strikes me as a little bit of verisimilitude that the horses appear to him on the hill and draw him from the car. Maybe it is Fate? Some kind of spiritual underpinning in a film overflowing with corporate facades. The horses represent Eden's struggle to reaffirm faith in humanity, to better the toxic slide and those who serve to keep the slurry coming.