Love this scene (and it *is* a scene). Michael Clayton is our proxy in the story—we see the action through his eyes and his are the emotions we're meant to empathize with. He has just executed a dangerous and complicated act of justice at great personal cost, and so also have we. Tony Gilroy and his actors have performed so well that *we* feel the emotional catharsis that *he's* feeling IN THIS SCENE.

How many times have you seen a film that threads the needle and sticks the landing and you're left in this period of whole-body/mind contemplation for the next half hour (or however long $50 would buy)? You look around but don't see anything. You might even puff your cheeks up, like Clooney, and blow out some air, "whoo."

Clooney is *you*, sitting in the aftermath of a masterpiece, feeling what you feel. Gilroy is MAKING SPACE FOR YOU TO FEEL what he knows you need to feel, right now, at the end of the movie. Other films have done this too, the closing tracking shot that freezes on the last frame and just watches the car drive off into the distance, or the background activity on the block. But this is the one that made me realize what those scenes are *for*, and I hadn't seen another that made quite so generous an identification with and for me before Michael Clayton. Thanks, Tony.

That last scene of The Descendants took me apart and put me back together again when I saw the film in the cinema. It reminds me of the omelette Stanley Tucci cooks at the end of Big Night—although the dead-on shot, like in Michael Clayton, so intimately implicates us. When The Descendants came out, I'd been going through Some Stuff, of the kind that had me white-knuckling my way through much of the movie. We've watched the King family crack and bend along every branch, and when Clooney's Matt and his daughters gather in front of March of the Penguins (which it strikes me now is another movie about the struggles of monogamy and territory and moving on), their resilience and togetherness is deeply healing.