Legal thriller reveals the man behind the curtain
Reel Time
Jim Hoffman
Michael Clayton (2007, 119 minutes, G)
3 1/2 (out of four)
Michael Clayton is an enormously satisfying film that owes a lot to the paranoid thrillers of the seventies, like The Parallax View and The Conversation. It is a lean, slickly assembled drama about a man, more intelligent than he needs to be, who begins to believe that there ’s a they out to get him.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a lawyer who never sees the inside of a courtroom. Some time during his career, he decided to take on the role of fixer for an affluent law firm — the guy who sweeps dirt under the rug. Painfully aware that his best years are behind him, he faces insurmountable debts, strained family relationships and an unsatisfying career.
His charisma aside, Clooney is getting better with each movie. He carries this film gracefully, offering a mesmerizingly understated performance, honed through films like Syriana and Solaris. He plays Clayton as a man who might never feel rested again. You can see the screaming desperation behind his eyes. His cool fa çade, a survival mechanism against the wolves that surround him.
The film opens with the mad ramblings of Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a fellow lawyer who, after toiling for six years on a multi-billion dollar class action suit against chemical giant UNorth, publicly snaps during a deposition.
Clayton’s job is to straighten out his old friend and calm a very nervous UNorth counselor (Tilda Swinton). While Arthur freely admits that he might be crazy, he begs Michael to consider that he and Clayton are working to defend a company guilty of gross criminal negligence.
What works so well in Michael Clayton is that nothing is hidden in the name of suspense. The film revels in how powerful people navigate under enormous pressure. Most films of this genre leave the hired thugs in the shadows. Here every unnerving detail reveals how they operate and what it takes to send them into their own tailspin of paranoia.
Although the film offers more than is needed to tell a deceptively simple morality tale, its fine details add up, making Michael Clayton one of the most intelligent and compelling thrillers to come out in a long while.
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