His eyes are always weary while facing a client whose legal mess he has to clean up. He has to put up with people who irately bark at him after he bears the bad news that there is really no such thing as “options” and that the best he can do is to recommend a good attorney. When one client says that the law firm he works for said that he would be a miracle worker, he explains, “I’m not a miracle worker. I’m a janitor. The math here is simple: The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean it up.”
He is the titular character of Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, which tells the story of a man whose life of working as a legal fixer at a powerful New York law firm has long left him deprived of any kind of idealism or aspiration. As played by George Clooney, he dresses in nice suits and exudes success and command in appearance but his wife has left him and his life moves from one crisis to another, whether a client’s or his own. Gambling is one addiction he cannot shake off and that only leaves him more incapable of paying off a $75,000 debt he owes to some dangerous people who mean business.
Amidst his broken life, he must now deal with his own firm’s chief litigator and his former mentor, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), who is supposed to defend a powerful agro-chemical company called U/North against a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit regarding lethal pollution. Edens also has bipolar disorder, however, and after skipping a few medications and suffering from a mental breakdown, he is overridden with guilt that he may have been defending a corrupt corporation. Thus, the head of the law firm, Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) sends Clayton in to take care of the problem, particularly since the executives at U/North, including chief legal executive Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), will do anything to eliminate all potentially damaging claims that may cost the company.
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