Films that center on greed are hardly new. Hollywood has long been fascinated by man's thirst for money and power. Often in these films, the spotlight shines on someone with one last shot at redemption. Sometimes the struggle is played out in the courtroom, as with Paul Newman's portrayal of Frank Galvin in 1982's The Verdict. Galvin, a down on his luck lawyer, gets involved in a medical malpractice suit that all parties are willing to settle out of court. Stumbling his way through the preliminaries, Galvin suddenly realizes that the case deserves its day in court to punish the guilty and get a fair settlement for his clients.

Though Michael Clayton never has a scene in a courtroom, the film is very reminiscent of the courtroom dramas that populated the film landscape in the 1970s and '80s. George Clooney, fresh off award-winning performances in Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana, plays Michael Clayton, a lawyer who works as a "fixer" in a large New York City law firm, Kenner Bach. Michael's the go to guy when the firm's clients are in trouble. He has all the connections and knows where all the bodies are buried. Though he can fix any problem at the firm, his personal life is a mess. Divorced, he sees his young son on the weekends between urgent calls from work and drives him to school in the mornings. He's in debt to loan sharks for a bar his alcoholic brother Timmy (David Landsbury) talked him into starting and he has a gambling problem.

In the midst of all this, Clayton is called in when Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), one of the firm's best litigators, stops taking his medicine for bipolar disorder. Edens has spent six years of his life — "six years scheming and stalling and screaming," as he puts it — working for a single client, U/North, knee deep in a $3 billion lawsuit over its failure to follow safety regulations. Given Clayton's own financial problems, quieting Arthur down might be Michael's only way out of debt.

The only thing Clayton doesn't count on is Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the chief counsel at U/North and all around attack dog. She will stop at nothing to keep U/North's hands clean. A smartly crafted scene in which Swinton painfully rehearses every answer, movement, and nuance for a media interview tells us everything we need to know about her character's mentality.