Michael Clayton (Movie Review by Bob Racine)

2 hours, color, 2007

Can you imagine what it would feel like to wake up one fine day and realize that the cause to which you have devoted enormous energy and commitment for many years, heart and soul, is just the opposite of what you had always assumed it was?  Here we have a man who thinks he has served a humane and noble purpose by pouring himself into the manufacture of a weed killer that allegedly will enrich the soil of thousands of failing farms across the nation and lift the fortunes of people struggling to survive, who discovers that the product is a deadly cancerous poison that will have just the opposite effect upon the ground in which it is planted.  Let us further imagine that this man is a bipolar individual who can only maintain emotional balance if he takes a stash of prescribed drugs on a daily basis.  Add this tenuous condition to the rude awakening and you have someone who while going off the meds becomes a walking dangerous liability to the company whose product he is supposed to be promoting, a person teetering on the edge of madness.  

Such a one is the pivotal character around whom this legal thriller is woven.  As played by Tom Wilkinson he lights quite a fire.  But the director Tony Gilroy introduces him in a most unconventional manner.  We hear him in voiceover for about the first three minutes or so of the footage.  He is spewing forth a mouthful of seemingly incoherent protestation, as the camera peruses the normal activity of the New York City law firm called UNorth, by which he is employed.  The sharp contrast between the apparently peaceful work scene and the demented rantings of Wilkinson is rather strange and unsettling.  What, we are inclined to wonder, is going on?  All on the surface is calm and civil while the voice we hear suggests that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.  The first hint we get that all is not rosy with UNorth is a phone call from a journalist picked up by one of the firm’s top flight lawyers Marty Bach (Sidney Pollack).  The unseen journalist is sniffing out rumors that the firm is about to merge with a British company, an inquiry Bach treats dismissively. 

The frantic words in voiceover are being addressed to a man named Michael. The message has been sent by phone or is about to be.  Presumably this Michael is someone attached to the firm, someone that the troubled man considers his only confidant, the only one who stands a chance of being a sympathetic listener to the outrageous tale he is trying to tell in his broken, disjointed speech.  It is not until a few minutes later that we learn who Michael is.  The name is Michael Clayton, the lead character that George Clooney is about to portray.  (Yes, the movie’s title is one and the same with the name of the lead man.)

Who is Clayton?  We meet him as he walks away from a poker game without finishing it.  He looks dejected and ill at ease, beaten, and within the following hour after he drives away in his car, an attempt is made on his life.  A flashback fills us in on why.  Clayton holds a law degree and was once a district attorney but has not practiced any law for some years.  Instead UNorth has used him as a “fixer”, someone who looks after the private lives of the law firm’s clients.  In plain, down-to-earth language he is hired to keep people out of trouble, to settle personal crises before they become the kind of major crises that could tarnish the name of the firm.  Clayton, who knows nothing about the fraudulent claims regarding the weed killer, UNorth’s product, has smarted under this job description, fixer, for years and has failed to be restored to the prestige of a practicing company attorney.  He calls himself a janitor.  

One thing that contributed to this status is his failure to make a success out of a project, once entered into with his brother, to erect a thriving restaurant business, the brother having turned out to be a self-destructive addict who ran the experiment into debt and sank it.  Clayton is still trying to sell off the property but having trouble getting a good offer.  He himself has a history of a gambling fixation.  So, no, our title character is not a heroic type.  He is kept where he is allegedly because he is good at cleaning up messes but has not yet proven capable of cleaning up his own.   

We learn that the frantic man we hear on the soundtrack is named Arthur, a recent middle-aged widower and an attorney who has unknowingly created the scandal that, as a matter of fact, has already surfaced in the form of a three billion dollar class action law suit.  Arthur is finally seen at the end of about the first half hour in Milwaukee hearing testimony, during which he does something obscene in public that is a major embarrassment to UNorth; he is arrested and of course Clayton is sent into the ring to bring the beast under control.  But Arthur soon becomes aware that Michael is not the sympathetic ear he has expected.  It seems that Arthur’s language about deception and cancer makes it impossible for Michael to understand what his friend is talking about.  When Arthur is murdered, the crime made to look like a drug overdose suicide, Michael’s suspicions are raised to such a height that he starts an investigation of his own and turns up some sordid documentation that gives shape to Arthur’s paranoid complaints.  This investigation puts Michael’s life in danger as well, hence the murder attempt already mentioned.  

Behind all this nefarious activity is none other than the chief counsel for UNorth, a high level woman named Karen Crowder, played brilliantly by Tilda Swinton.  (In fact, she won a Supporting Actress Oscar for this performance, one she rightly earned.)  Karen has a prodigious investment in the success of the firm, having climbed to the top tier over some years and still perfecting her bargaining and selling skills.  She almost singlehandedly has been put in charge of protecting the reputation of the supposed weed killing product.  She has lots of personal capital riding on the favorable outcome of the law suit leveraged against her firm.  She is not alone in the subterfuge; others collude with her, but she goes beyond even what they expect in hiring the assassins that plague Arthur and Michael.  

I like the way Gilroy directs her.  She does not come off as some sensuous personality using her seductive manner to hook her buyers, no guns blazing approach.  In fact, she is not very attractive at all.  She has other more subtle devices for beguiling the customers, and we get to see her in her solitary moments rehearsing her presentations; she comes across as clever but a bit tremulous.  In fact the first time we lay eyes on her she is in seclusion, half dressed and in a total nervous sweat.  

There is one other notable character in this drama, a grade school boy named Henry (Austin Williams), Michael’s son, a very sharp, curious and much read youngster who exerts a peculiar influence upon the nearly insane Arthur, a man he only talks to over the phone and never meets.  Henry seems to enjoy most of the time he spends with his divorced father when they are together.  The two of them have a very special moment when Michael makes his son aware of the gifts he possesses and urges him to keep excelling and to bypass the traps others in the family including himself have fallen into.  In a movie full of tough talk and ugly dealings and brazen encounters it is a warm and tender scene much to be savored.  I am so pleased that screenwriter Gilroy included it.  (Yes, Gilroy both wrote and directed.)   

“Michael Clayton” is one of the most powerful and penetrating screen dramas to show up over the past twenty years.  Released in 2007, I am just now reviewing it, because in that year this blog had not yet been set up; it would be five years later before I got started.  I have seen it several times studying its intricate plot structure and its brilliant interweave of personalities and its ever so insightful dialogue and its memorable encounters between the lead characters.  Nothing fanciful ever crops up in Director Gilroy’s devices; every move he makes is consistent in style and tone with every other.  The picture smolders; it never gets away from him.

The R rating is fitting; there are words spoken that you would not want your preschoolers or preteens to hear.  We are taken into a world that the decent ones among us would not want to visit for real, but it all shapes up into a morality play of Shakespearian quality.  It carries the echo of St. Paul’s reference to “evil in high places”.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To know about me, consult the autobiographical entry on the website for Dec. 5, 2016.