If one needed a single word to sum up “Michael Clayton,” that word would inevitably be “despite.” Despite Tom Wilkinson’s powerhouse performance, despite the gritty realism of the cinematography, despite the fact it has one of the most cerebrally frightening scenes in modern cinema (you’ll know it when you see it), “Michael Clayton” is not a gripping movie.
The movie centers on Michael Clayton (George Clooney), who is the in-house “fixer” at a major New York law firm. The nature of his work is established in one of the most engaging scenes of the film, where he is called out to a veritable mansion in upstate New York to give counsel to a sniveling piece of corporate slime who has just hit a pedestrian with his car and then fled the scene.
In a vain attempt to give the audience an empathetic connection to Clayton, a plethora of personal problems are rattled off, including financial troubles and issues with raising a child in a separated family. After the foundations have been laid, Arthur Edens (Wilkinson) enters the film, allowing it to progress toward its main focus. Edens is a high-powered attorney who stops taking his medication in the middle of an important class-action lawsuit, driving Clayton’s law firm and their clients, the defending corporation, into a state of emergency.
The irony is that this film fails while having so much going for it. One of the strongest thematic elements in the film centers on the fact that Edens devoted several years of his career to a lawsuit that amounts to little more than the clients’ unwillingness to be held financially responsible for their product causing illness and death to a group of Wisconsin farmers. The characters who grapple with the moral implications of this case are not presented as mustache-twirling villains, but rather represent a much more credible class of perpetrators present in today’s society. Though the United States doesn’t have masked men with bandoliers shooting AK-47’s, the nation’s evildoers are the compliant majority, a fact hammered home deftly by the filmmakers.
Other thematic elements in the film are less successful. It is obvious that the audience is meant to contrast Clayton and Edens through the way they interact with Clayton’s son, but what effect this is supposed to have on the audience’s understanding and enjoyment of the work is not made completely clear.
The truth is, “Michael Clayton’s” plot is boring—it feels more like watching a corporate board meeting than the cerebral thriller it was intended to be. Clayton is stiff and unlovable, but Clooney’s acting is not to blame. It’s possible that when the filmmakers had the film in mind they imagined entertainment taking a backseat to social commentary.
While the film doesn’t suffer for lack of conflict, the filmmakers must have forgotten that in an industry built on sex and violence, movies about class-action lawsuits don’t fill the pews like they used to. Where are Julia Roberts’ breasts when you need them?
