Directed by: Tony Gilroy
Starring: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson, Sydney Pollack
George Clooney excels at playing the smooth operator who knows the angles. As Michael Clayton, a "fixer" for a high-powered New York law firm, it's his job to know the angles and to anticipate new ones. This is soul-sucking business, and soon Michael finds it's more than he can handle. He is an attorney, yes, but his job isn't to try cases. It's to put out fires. Clean up messes. As he tells one client in a boatload of trouble: "I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a janitor," He's correct, and this type of work weighs on him.
Michael's janitorial services are put to the extreme test when his friend and colleague Arthur Edens (Wilkinson), the lead attorney defending the firm's top client in a multi-billion dollar wrongful death class action suit, commits an act of pure insanity. Arthur is tired of defending a guilty client, and one snowy night, he strips naked during a deposition and runs after the plaintiffs in a parking lot. He is thrown in jail, and soon released to head back to New York. Michael has to clean up the mess, which gets worse when the chemical company's chief attorney Karen Crowder (Swinton) decides to take the cleanup to more dangerous levels, including murder.
Is Arthur insane, or crazy like a fox? No matter, when we see him walking on New York's streets with a shit-eating grin on his face, we know the answer, or we think we do. For a few moments, Arthur deludes himself into thinking he can just walk away. Not in this world. Michael learns that also, and soon finds himself the target of Karen's thugs. Michael Clayton has elements of a legal thriller, but it is also a character study of a man up to his eyeballs in debt from a failed restaurant venture with few options except to do what he does best. Would he rather be in a courtroom? Definitely. Will it happen? No way.
Michael Clayton is a gripping story of trapped people. Arthur is trapped in a case which leaves him guilt-stricken. Karen, in order to protect her job and her chances of promotion, feels she has no alternative but to tidy up loose ends permanently. And then there's Michael, trapped in a job he never anticipated having when graduating from law school. When his boss, Marty Bach (Pollack, in another gem of a performance from the acclaimed director) pays off his debt, Michael is now even further trapped, unless he can scheme his way out. Even if he can, will it be enough to set him on another path?
We learn how much bullshit the people in Michael Clayton can put with, and lines they won't go beyond. Arthur hit is limit. Michael is about to hit his, and Karen finds if killing off Arthur can advance her career and protect her company's interests, she can live with whatever pesky guilt she may encounter. Swinton (in an Oscar-winning performance) is as sleek and tailored as Karen, but she is far more ruthless and cold. You may think Clooney is playing another smoothie role, but Michael Clayton is only smooth and unruffled on the outside. We sense what all of this is doing to him on the inside, and this is where Michael Clayton exits the routine and enters a world of murky morals and consequences. When he tells Karen in a critical scene, "I'm not the guy you kill, I'm the guy you buy," just listen to the self-loathing dripping from his voice.
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