Every so often, Hollywood will be kind to those of who think we’re going mad when we see fare such as Transformers or Spider-Man 3. Luckily, 2007’s Michael Clayton was a film that showed Hollywood doesn’t always miss the forest for the trees, in a year that produced some of the best studio films of the decade.
Michael Clayton captures the spirit of the Sydney Lumet-Francis Ford Coppola films of the 1970s with fresh energy. The film’s story of a morally corrupted man who’s fighting to regain his soul proves just as important as its intricate plot.
George Clooney, who plays the eponymous character without the hipster charm of Danny Ocean, works at one of New York’s most prestigious law firms, Kenner, Bach & Ledeen. He’s the firm’s “janitor,” sweeping up the messes of the firm’s highest priced, effete clients. (He’s the type of guy that Larry Craig and Eliot Spitzer should have called.) When he’s called in one day to clean up the mess of one of the firm’s own lawyers, Arthur Edens, Clayton becomes wrapped up in a controversial case, involving multinational, agricultural conglomerate U-North. U-North’s general counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) exerts pressure on Clayton, and his law firm, to reign in the mentally deteriorating Edens, before the wrongful death lawsuit in which her company is embroiled is lost.
From this premise, writer-director Tony Gilroy (writer of the last-two Bourne films) conducts an intelligent, taut thriller that examines the morality of every one of its key players. Clooney disappears behind the world-weary eyes of his character and gives the best performance of his career. He exudes the disillusionment of a man who knows his choices have got him to where he is, and knows that it’s no one’s fault but his own. Tom Wilkinson, who plays the manic-depressive Edens, is also brilliant. His character’s metaphysical epiphany in the film is on par with that of Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network. He’s a man who realizes that he’s contributed to suffering in his life, and he wants to atone. His character gives Michael Clayton the opportunity to do the same with his own life.
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