In the course of his end-of-year retrospective, New York’s David Epstein gives us a frightening peek inside his own damn brain pan during this glowing review of Michael Clayton: “I play [Tom Wilkinson’s] last scene with Tilda Swinton over and over in my mind: “Do I look like I’m negotiating?” And, most inspiring: “I am Shiva, the god of death.*” [Italics added for fucking emphasis]
*Writer/director Tony Gilroy cribbed this line from Robert Oppenheimer, who claimed that he thought “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds” as he watched the first atomic bomb detonate over Los Alamos, though in fact the odds are very good that this was retrospective guilt on Oppie’s part. A scientist who was there said that Oppenheimer was strutting like a gunfighter after the bomb went off. Since the construction of the atomic bomb was easily the greatest scientific engineering feat in the history of the world, I think Oppie was entitled to do a little strutting.
