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George Clooney comes unprecedentedly near to playing a damaged man, a weak man, a defeated man, in this corporate-legal thriller, which comes swathed in a fur of anxiety and shame.
Perhaps it could be objected that Clooney’s style and body language as a loser are not so very different from when he plays a winner. It’s an arresting performance none the less: muscular and pain-racked at once.
Tony Gilroy, who scripted the Bourne movies, writes and directs, and Clooney plays Michael Clayton, a ‘fixer’ in a top-notch New York City law firm; his street smarts and cop contacts have over the years made him invaluable at discreetly clearing up the firm’s embarrassing messes.
But social class and taboo have ensured that he has never been considered good enough to be made a partner.
Clayton is ‘Other Ranks’, good enough for the dirty work but very poor company in the officer’s mess.
In fact, his long and triumphant history at saving the bacon of the firm’s top clients and executives has made him an untouchable: a walking reminder of their nasty little secrets, and thus not to be allowed into the Wasp inner sanctum of partnership.
As Clayton approaches middle-age with a failed marriage and stalled career, this personal slight has been eating him up, and he has taken solace in playing poker against people with deeper pockets than his, and he’s bet his entire savings on opening his own trendy restaurant.
Both interests have been catastrophic, and some very unsavoury characters are now requesting the repayment of informally arranged loans.
Clayton faces ruin, failure and shame, and it is at this low point that he faces the trickiest moment of his professional career: covering up the spectacular nervous breakdown of the firm’s most valuable partner Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) whose personal crisis is a more tumultuous, extroverted version of his own.
Arthur has realised that he has given the best years of his life to defending an agri-pharmaceutical company whose product, he now realises, has been poisoning people in precisely the way the class-action plaintiffs allege.
This firm is represented by Karen Chowder (Tilda Swinton), who is herself stricken by the terrible things she now has to do to protect her employer.
It is a sleek world of business suits and executive prestige, built on dysfunction and concealment, a world in which each legal warrior is suppressing his or her qualms for fear of looking weak.
The head honcho of Clayton’s law firm is Marty Bach, played compellingly by Sydney Pollack, who is absolutely believable in this kind of aggressive role.
It’s very similar to his performance opposite Tom Cruise in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut or indeed opposite the hapless Ben Affleck in Roger Michell’s Changing Lanes. He is the grizzled voice of hard-won authority, brusquely telling a junior to get real.
Only this time, the junior is Clayton, a man who knows far more about the reality than Pollack’s alpha-lion cares to discover.
It is Marty’s unpleasant task to deal with Clayton’s request for a cash advance – a demand both men are aware could look like blackmail.
As a corporate-paranoia movie, Michael Clayton has something in common with Michael Mann’s The Insider, and at a further remove with Coppola’s The Conversation. (There is, it must be admitted, one baffling plot hole about why some freelance assassins should make one wet job look like a heart attack, and yet in another case use a very tactless car-bomb.)
Swinton has some great scenes as the career lawyer who is almost literally poisoned with fear: pale, dyspeptic.
At one moment, she is smoothly handling a video conference; at another, she is vomiting in agony in a ladies’ room cubicle; and in another, she is having an electrifyingly tense conference in the street with some sinister guys about a certain difficulty that now needs to be handled in a certain way.
It is another very good performance from Swinton.
The movie is not so much a paranoia thriller, more a character study – albeit obliquely rendered – showing the corrosive effect of years of swallowed disappointment.
Clayton’s central scene comes with a confrontation with his brother Gene, the
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