George Clooney plays the title character of Michael Clayton, a nominee for Best Picture of 2007. However, despite the amount of screen time that Clooney gets and despite the fact that his character is obviously central to the plot, the strength of this film is in the ensemble cast. Some of the best actors working these days make Michael Clayton an interesting movie to watch. Think of the names Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and the late Sydney Pollack (and Clooney too), and you'll know what I mean.
The plot is a bit too labyrinthine for most people's tastes, I'd imagine. Clooney plays the "fixer" of a prestigious law firm; he's the one you call in when you have a mess that needs to be cleaned up or taken care of quietly. He's asked to help with a case that has led to a nervous breakdown by one of the firm's partners, Arthur Edens (Wilkinson). Arthur has spent years representing a major agribusiness corporation that is charged with knowingly poisoning people with one of its weedkillers. The multi-billion-dollar case is handled from the company's side by Karen Crowder (Swinton), a very deliberate and calculating attorney who is still relatively new to the job and does not want to lose so much money for her firm. She does seem, after all, to have ambitions.
Soon after Clooney starts working on the case, though, his car is blown up and he begins to realize that Arthur is also in danger. He has to begin piecing together what Arthur has been doing since the older attorney has gone missing and refuses to answer his phone. Karen, meanwhile, is planning for a way to ensure that the truth behind the case (as outlined in a memo that admits the agribusiness company's complicity) never gets revealed.
I may have made that sound relatively simple to follow, but the movie doesn't follow the plot quite that directly. It actually starts with a sequence of events before Clayton's car explodes and then goes back in time to show us earlier events. There are some other flashbacks within flashbacks, which might account for why this film never seemed to catch on with the public. I have to admit that watching it a second time recently helped me to clarity the sequence of events a great deal more than I expected.
The plot, however, is not the best part of the movie. It's the acting. Clooney has taken on a series of challenging roles in recent years, and I think this is one of his best. He's excellent in the part, a truly complex man who has so many dreams that just keep failing to materialize. Wilkinson has a rather showy role, particularly in a couple of scenes where he gets to "demonstrate" the depths of his nervous breakdown. Swinton won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress this year, and I think many people watching this film for the first time might not understand why. But if you watch it more than once, you'll begin to see just how controlling and controlled her Karen Crowder is. She's quiet, certainly, but there's a great deal of malice beneath the surface here. She makes for a tremendous villain.
I have to mention Sydney Pollack briefly, at least. He's the head of the law firm that employs Clayton and Edens, and he's great as always. This was one of Pollack's last acting roles, and it will remind you just how good an actor he was. No doubt his understanding of the skill of acting made him a better director. It's a very bittersweet feeling I have watching this movie now.
I'm not certain that I would have picked Michael Clayton as one of the five best movies of last year. (No, I don't have an alternative list for you.) In many ways, it's a very old fashioned suspense thriller. The only difference between it and a similar movie made in, say, the 1970s is the jumbling of the sequence of events in the plot. It works better, it seems to me, as a showcase for some fine acting by several talented performers instead.
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