A Man for Our Season: Michael Clayton, one man’s ethical wasteland

We need not go back as far as Thomas More, even the saint as updated in Robert Bolt’s film, to find moral heroes in cinema. Through the movies of an earlier age we saw Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and even Gary Cooper portray plain-speaking men who faced down the “big shots” with simple homespun certainties. They were country boys, but they knew right from wrong, and no fancy talk from city slickers could change their minds. These men rose from the plains and cornfields to seize the moral high ground and defend it as their personal Masada. They were Thomas Mores in overalls.

What a difference a few decades have made. Over the past seven years, the folksy language of Frank Capra’s America has been co-opted to mask unspeakable atrocities. In a complicated world of competing ideologies, plain speaking and unshakable certainties have led to a corruption of values rather than ethical clarity. Ends no longer merely justify means; now dubious ends dictate repugnant means. Torture has entered the vocabulary as a less reprehensible concept than welfare. Robbed of both innocence and decency, we no longer wonder who has seized the moral high ground, but whether a moral high ground exists anywhere.

This article appears in November 26 2007.