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Michael Clayton (2007)
Director: Tony Gilroy
Synopsis
Michael Clayton is an in-house ‘fixer’ at one of the largest corporate law firms in New York, doing dirty work at the behest of his boss. Though exhausted and unhappy, his divorce, a failed business venture and mounting debt have left Clayton tied to the firm. At U/North, meanwhile, the career of litigator Karen Crowder rests on the multi-million dollar settlement of a class action suit that Clayton's firm is leading to a seemingly successful conclusion. But when their brilliant and guilt-ridden attorney Arthur Edens sabotages the case, Clayton faces the biggest challenge of his career and his life.
Movie review
From Time Out New York
By now, George Clooney is so smooth, he could be a brand name like Gillette or Ex-Lax. Occasionally fattened up for serious holiday fare like Syriana, he’ll always be first and foremost a perfectly coiffed variant of Danny Ocean; this critic’s favorite is his impossibly clever divorce lawyer in the Coens’ underrated Intolerable Cruelty. But how to bridge the two Clooneys, the suavely silly one and the soberly sincere one?
Michael Clayton, solemnly titled in the manner of great ’70s crusader movies like Norma Rae and Serpico, takes a perfectly feasible stab at it. Again, it’s Clooney as cool customer, private card shark and lapsed attorney. But you can tell by the way he desperately lunges for his small son’s attentions as the kid bounds out of the passenger seat that this guy’s got deeper issues. They stem from working freelance for legal weasels like Marty (Pollack) and Arthur (a superbly unraveling Wilkinson), both in a firm about to come under heavy fire for abetting some serious corporate malfeasance.
Yes, the film becomes one of those, with Clayton radicalizing—actually, waking is more apt—into an insistent rooter of crime. Debuting director Tony Gilroy, best known as the key writer behind the Bourne movies, loves the mile-a-minute browbeating of business types; often, this feels like a more heroic version of Glengarry Glen Ross. “You know exactly what you are,” hisses Clayton’s detective brother cryptically. The beauty of this rich, wrinkly movie—which ends on an unbroken close-up, the peak of Clooney’s art—is that we never completely do.
Author: Joshua Rothkopf
Time Out New York Issue 627: October 4–10, 2007
User reviews of this film
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- mythster S, said...
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Posted on May 04 2008 11:48
To "AAlia" et. al
"don't criticize what you don't understand... 'Cause the time they are a changing" - Report as inappropriate
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- Peter Masters said...
- Posted on Jan 03 2008 20:41 1. Michael Clayton is a sort of domestic Syriana with a law firm substituting for the multiple oil interests. Cupiditas, wearing a business suit and a string of pearls (Tilda Swinton in nervous bludgeon as the villain) plays the female counsel for a worldwide corporation hiding its guilt for poisoning people through its environmental products. To save itself, Ms. Swinton perspires uneasily, but nevertheless orders the murders of two people to stop exposure of the corporation’s guilt and insure a deal to save billions in payment to the victims. Elegantly shot (the camera glides smoothly through the law firm in the early morning hours discovering empty offices, ringing phones picking up messages, fax lines printing pages while the immigrant labor empties the trash cans and cleans the offices) the film unravels in the classic chic style of 1970 films. George Clooney as a fixer (but never a partner) for the law firm must try to salvage the damage Tom Wilkerson, chief litigator, has done to the case because he went off his meds and had an attack of integrity exposing the law firm and the corporation to discovery of its duplicity. George Clooney, as the fixer, Tom Wilkerson as the no more meds attorney and Tilda Swinton perform at the top of their game, which in this instance is somewhat higher than Kong had to climb to reach the top of you know what.
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- a said...
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Posted on Oct 17 2007 01:09
George Clooney's new movie, "Michael Clayton", is not your typical Hollywood morality play of good vs. evil. Indeed, one can perhaps argue that even by the end, there are no completely good people in it; it is a world inhabited by people who have various levels of morals and blood on their hands.
Michael Clayton, the movie's namesake, is a lawyer in a large law firm in midtown Manhattan who is known as a "fixer", that is, the firm lawyer that is called upon to assist clients of the firm who need help for difficult situations - DWIs, hit and runs, immigration, etc. Or as Clayton likes to say, "a janitor" - since he is the one who is always cleaning up the unsightly messes that clients get themselves into, ie: "adjusting the truth". As the movie progresses, we find out that one of the firm's top litigators and partner, Arthur, was arrested in Milwaukee after stripping naked during a deposition while defending against a class-action suit for one of the firm's largest clients, a multinational agricultural corporation. Thinking that this will be a standard mop-up situation of a partner who stopped taking his medication, Clayton heads for Milwaukee. But, as time goes on, Clayton (who we learn at this time is a Fordham Law graduate) begins to see that Arthur, while perhaps having lost some sense of psychological stability, has also regained a long-lost sense of morality. Inevitably, as Clayton tries his best to "fix" the partner's altered moral compass, he too is forced to come face to face with the role he plays in the process of enabling the evil that Arthur has come to reject. One can say that perhaps the Jesuit influence on his education nearly 2 decades prior is now coming to the fore.
As Arthur states while in his prison cell, where we end up in life is a result of the moral (or immoral as it may be) decisions we make, both large and small. Part of the beauty of this movie is that we see that there are no simple answers, only a lot of gray, even at the very end. - Report as inappropriate
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- Aalia said...
- Posted on Oct 11 2007 05:54 A half hearted plot which was nonsensical and farfetched most of the way through. Paying seven pounds to watch paint dry would have been more appealing, or just George Clooney naked instead of his ageing co-star. Appalling film, and you find yourself counting down the seconds til something decent happens or you can leave. If my seat hadn't been at the end of the row I'd have been out like a shot! I beg you, give £7 to charity and DON'T SEE THIS FILM! 1* for having Tilda in, who made it slightly bearable although I dare you to know what UNorth did without having read the synopsis!
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Cast & crew
Director: Tony Gilroy
Producer: Sydney Pollack, Jennifer Fox, Steven Samuels, Kerry Orent
Cast: George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack full cast
Rated: R
Duration: 119 mins
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