On the surface, Michael Clayton, starring George Clooney, is glossy thriller, sleekly lined like the sedan driven by the eponymous lawyer. Under the hood, though, it’s a different story. It’s powered by a sharply etched character study, content to let the law flash by in glimpses like billboards on a highway.
Michael Clayton is a lawyer and an enigma, even to those who work with him. He is the in-house ‘fixer’ for a law firm that has grown larger than the law. He is less a lawyer and more, as he ruefully sighs, a janitor. He’s an outsider, allowed to clean up the messes from the big boys, but resigned to the fact that he’ll never get a place at the table. When one self-righteous client snaps at him – “Are you a fixer? Or are you just not very good at it?” – Clayton’s poker face can’t conceal that he’s all too aware of his status.
Clayton’s skills at making problems disappear are put to the test when a colleague has a manic episode during a critical deposition. That attorney was spearheading a six year battle, defending a multi-national agribusiness that knowingly sold a cancer-causing pesticide. In his manic state, he strips down to his socks and streaks across a snowy parking lot before threatening to spill billions of dollars worth of dirty secrets. Clayton, already at the end of his own rope, finds himself face to face with a problem he can’t contain.
If movie stars mostly play themselves onscreen, then here is the George Clooney who never got his big break; the guy who made it to the minor leagues on charm but couldn’t hit in the majors. Michael Clayton is a man whose failures outweigh his successes – divorced, broke, middle-aged and dead-ended at the office. He’s acutely aware that he might work among gods, but he’ll never join their ranks. Clooney effortlessly slips into his character and wears him like a rumpled suit. It’s a mesmerizing and powerful performance, without a trace of vanity.
The precision engineering in the script is largely in the dialogue. The back room deals, the board room pleas, and the whispered legal wrangling all have a crisp twang of corporate reality. The people who walk these architecturally imposing hallways feel omnipotent, re-arranging right and wrong to suit their whims. Clayton’s dialogue, too, is a pitch-perfect capture of white collar desperation.
For all its precision, Michael Clayton starts awkwardly – first with a manic torrent of dialogue, echoing through the oppressively cavernous law offices. Then it spins through a number of fragments, culminating in a peculiar shot of Clayton admiring some horses in the grey dawn, as his car explodes, before whisking us back to “four days earlier.” The way-back machine and scrambled chronologies are fast becoming a cliché; but as soon as he rewinds to the beginning, first time director Tony Gilroy lands firmly on his feet.
Gilroy, ironically, is best known as the writer of all three Bourne movies. None of which are remarkably verbose, though what dialogue there is gets fired off in a staccato rhythm similar to Michael Clayton. As a director, he eschews trickery and flash. There’s a brief, early scene in Clayton’s office, where overlapped phone conversations quickly sketch out his role in the firm. The current style is to cut sequences like this as if they were shot in a blender and assembled by a team of music-video experts. Jumps cuts and flash frames would be rhythmically cross cut with phones ringing, Clayton rattling off dialogue, with flashing frames of white visually popping the audience across the cuts. Tony Gilroy and his editor avoid all that fuss, montaging Clayton’s career with simple and clean edits, confident that letting the story unfold simply will be powerful enough.
That approach pays off handsomely, keeping the tension level high while enhancing Clooney’s intense, precision work. Even the jumbled opening pays off near the end, as knowing where the pieces fall keeps your attention riveted on the characters. By the time the story reconnects to Clayton on that hillside, we’re not watching the climax of an action thriller, we’re watching a man truly hit bottom. The pulse-pounding editing suddenly stops, the orchestral music cue crescendos, and instead of the explosion we’re expection, there’s an extended moment of silence. In a riveting, climactic moment, Clooney delivers by showing nearly nothing. He’s been drowning in his own failures and frustrations; too far gone to snap, too old to cry, too cynical to be surprised, Clooney conveys it all with a slump of the shoulders and the light flickering out of his eyes.
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