A manic-depressive is on the loose, spilling valuable and job-threatening information about one of the country's largest firms.
A lawyer must fight for the truth after years of making money by twisting it.
A car explodes.
Surely, a movie with all this can't be boring. Can it?
Tony Gilroy's directorial debut stars George Clooney as Michael Clayton, a "fixer" for an international law firm. After lying for years and hating his job, he is forced to defend the truth when manic-depressive attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) sabotages the firm. The movie also stars Tilda Swinton and Sydney Pollack.
The film starts off promisingly enough, with a strong narrative by Wilkinson eerily rambling about how unclean he feels. We then see Clooney in all his gruff, no-nonsense glory. As a "fixer," he covers up potential career-ruiners with double-speak. In his first scene, he analyzes all the details of a hit-and-run so quickly it nearly makes the poor victim's head spin. Five minutes later and Clooney's narrowly escaping a car bomb.
Despite all those nasty car explosions and crazy double-speak, the film's simply not that interesting. The opening 10 minutes promise a much more intriguing movie than we are treated to for the first hour; quite simply, very little happens until the final 30 minutes.
Gilroy, who also wrote the script, has no trouble fleshing out his characters and portraying the many complex pressures of sustaining a notable law firm (though the sheer amount of business jargon and double-talk may be confusing). The problem is that the audience just doesn't care. The details of the murky plot unfold so slowly that most interest is gone by the time one of the key characters is killed off.
Visually, the movie is ho-hum. This is a great disappointment from the writer of the "Bourne" trilogy, a film series noticed for its jumpy hand-held camera action. A supposedly dramatic scene of Clooney trying to burst through the bathroom door fails to evoke any sort of excitement. No surprise cuts, no tension, nothing unexpected. One of the scenes is almost laughable - Clooney leaves his car and runs up a hill in an empty field. The camera stops with Clooney, then very slowly pans around to reveal a trio of horses. The scene is so absurd and out of place in this drama/thriller, and the odd, calming music accompanying it doesn't help.
Still, Clooney logs in another great performance; we clearly see his frustration, his stress, his juggling of multiple responsibilities. One expects him to pull an Al Pacino from "The Godfather: Part III" and shout, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Swinton and Pollack also hold their own, balancing the movie's tense atmosphere. The former, in one truly fine scene, shows two great sides of her character early on. During a press conference, she discusses the merits and success of Unorth, the fictional firm (which is given much detail and realism in the film; we even see a commercial for it that could legitimately be aired). As she bubbles over the statistics, the shot cuts to her practicing her lines in front of her mirror, breaking down after every rehearsed sentence.
But the true star is Wilkinson, whose eccentric mannerisms and raw enthusiasm for every line made me want the film to succeed. He's the only genuine character, the only one who doesn't cover up his personality, the only one trying to tell those around him all he knows. In any scene, even paired with Clooney, Wilkinson shines brightest.
"Michael Clayton" opens nationwide tomorrow.
