As “Swoony” Clooney films go, you’re unlikely to confuse this one with Ocean’s Thirteen. Tony Gilroy’s (who wrote of the first two Bourne films) makes his directorial debut with Michael Clayton, a fiercely sombre piece of work that, at its best, harks back to the heavy-duty seventies screenplays of Paddy Chayefsky. Mr. Clooney, who has rarely been better, plays a “fixer” for an elite corporate law firm, New York’s Kenner, Bach & Ledeen. Clients refer to him as a “miracle worker” but by his own reckoning he’s little more than “a janitor.”
The decidedly unhurried drama takes us through various diabolical machinations of Big Business. One of the firm’s top litigators, Arthur (Tom Wilkinson, impressively spouting mad metaphors about septic wombs), suffers a breakdown while taking a deposition defending multinational conglomerate U/North against a multibillion-dollar class-action lawsuit.
It’s bad timing for all concerned. Sydney Pollack, playing the head of the firm, is in the process of signing off a multi-million dollar merger. The press are suspicious. The wolves are circling. And so on. Enter George’s titular lackey, who, in the process of “fixing” discovers that he must choose between his job and the right thing.
Embellished with meaty dialogue and a jaded aesthetic, Michael Clayton seeks to be a Gulf War film in the way that The Parallax View was a Vietnam War film. It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the King Lear vibe is simply too oppressive to keep the audience onboard. On other occasions, the hard-boiled tropes – George steps out of his car to gaze pregnantly at ponies during an early scene – don’t sit right at all. But this is a fine, gloomy picture nonetheless.