The partnership of George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh has been a fruitful one — for every Ocean’s Eleven, there’s a Good Night, and Good Luck. waiting around the corner. Now, once again serving as executive producers, Clooney and Soderbergh have given us Michael Clayton, the directorial debut of screenwriter Tony Gilroy.
Michael Clayton (Clooney) is a “fixer” in a legal firm in New York, troubleshooting the unexpected and cleaning up other people’s messes. He doesn’t particularly enjoy his job, which seems closer to legal janitorial work than anything of great significance, and his personal life is spiralling out of control with a failed business venture, a gambling addiction and mounting debts. When Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), one of the firm’s top partners and an old friend of Clayton’s, has a spectacular manic episode during a filmed deposition, Clayton is once again relied upon to rectify the situation.
On the surface, this film concerns the kind of corporate greed that puts the bottom line ahead of ordinary people’s lives, but there’s something more fundamental going on here. Edens, through a series of rants brought about by his unmedicated bipolar disorder, talks about the filth and taint that he’s accumulated over the years in his role of defending the indefensible. On the other end of the spectrum is Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the lead counsel for the company U/North (whom Edens was defending), who effectively sells her soul in order to please her masters, willing to sacrifice any moral code she may possess. Clayton seems somewhere in the middle, caught in an amoral malaise that seems both endless and futile.
The four main stars are all excellent. Clooney’s Clayton is clearly a man fed-up with his job — his eyes and facial tics betray the years of having to fix the problems of people who seem least deserving of help. Swinton, meanwhile, plays Crowder as a woman clearly over her head and looking for easy answers, and you can see on her face a barely contained panic that could surface at any moment. Sydney Pollack as Marty Bach, another partner at the firm, is, of course, as reliable as ever, giving his character an edge and sense of menace that might not have been there otherwise.
I was, however, well prepared for Tom Wilkinson to resort to scene chewing as the manic depressive Arthur Edens, but he’s consistently on-note. One scene in particular has Edens raving one moment yet completely lucid the next, and yet Wilkinson pulls off the transition seamlessly.
Gilroy, as both writer and director, has achieved something few manage to pull off: a confident yet understated, intelligent directorial debut. This is not a film that necessarily signals the arrival of a great auteur, but its quality and craftsmanship serve it well nonetheless.
[...] The pacing overall manages to maintain the film’s tension, and the screenplay (co-written by Michael Clayton’s Tony Gilroy) doesn’t let-on that there’s less going on than it seems until [...]