Michael Clayton

Review By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

I love that my job is to write about movies, but since movies can be about anything, that gets me into trouble sometimes. Take Michael Clayton. Here's a movie that takes place in the world of giant law firms and bigger corporations, a world I know nothing about, and most of the conversations are so dense and complex I felt like I needed to pass the bar to understand it all. That the movie so willingly delves into its subject matter without pandering to a mass audience is quite commendable; it also means I'm going to have a hard time explaining the intricacies of the plot, even with the press notes at my side.

The basic hook is this: Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a "fixer" at Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, an NYC law firm: whenever they need to clean up messes (a rich current client is involved in a hit and run, for example), he makes the calls and does the damage control. The firm is currently well on its way to reaching a multi-million-dollar settlement of a class action lawsuit with a company called U/North, represented by litigator Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton). Before that happens, the main Kenner Bach attorney on the case, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), goes nuts, has a crisis of conscience, strips off his clothes during a conference and runs through a parking lot naked. Clayton is brought in to fix things.

Michael Clayton is a thriller, yes; we know that because the movie opens with his car exploding (without him in it), and then jumps back to "Four Days Earlier" so we can see how things reached that point. But the key to the movie's success is that it's legitimately interested, not in explosions or murders, but with the lives and jobs of its characters. Clayton himself, of course, has a personal life in shambles: he's burnt out but has lost his savings, he has a young son from a failed marriage, and he has a strained relationship with his cop brother. But the film also pays close attention to its other characters, like Edens, who's not just a simple nutcase but is actually a wildly smart lawyer who's been battling manic depression, and Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), one of the partners at the firm, who goes way back with Clayton.

The fine actors who inhabit these roles are responsible for breathing life into them; George Clooney gives a deft, modulated performance, while Wilkinson and Swinton manage to both be slimy and sympathetic, although one is more sympathetic and one is more slimy. The real star of the show here, however, is writer/director Tony Gilroy. A writer on all three Bourne movies and the hostage-negotiation drama Proof of Life, he seems fascinated by men who ...