Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton (2007) examines the life of a compromised man wandering lost in a dark wood. He's been wandering long enough that he can hardly remember where the woods began. The main character Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is divorced. He picks his young son up each morning and drives him to school; there is, we learn, a distance growing between them. Clayton has worked for the same law firm for 18 years but hasn't been named a partner yet. Instead, he is a fixer, someone who solves other people's problems, who has a real knack for finding solutions. There's a certain shadiness to what he does. He describes himself as a "janitor." His self-image, if we want to use the term, is low. Does this mean that he lacks the legal skills that would allow him to become a partner? Or does his ability to stay below the line of visibility makes him more valuable to the firm than he would be as a partner? Or are his own flaws the obstacles? He has a gambling addiction, and though he tells someone in the film that he hasn't gambled for years, one of the first things we see him doing is play cards. His strong loyalty to his family, especially his wayward brother, forces him into difficult situations. Early in the film we learn that he has assumed a large debt incurred by his brother and that a loan shark is pressuring him, threatening him, for payment that he can't deliver. He also works for a law firm that specializes in defense work for a chemical company whose products have apparently caused hundreds of deaths. His firm is defending the company against a law suit that could cost billions of dollars in damages. Michael Clayton is a compromised man, damaged goods, and one of the questions explored by the film is whether he's content to stay that way, especially when confronted by the crisis of a best friend and close colleague.

Michael Clayton begins in medias res. We first see Clayton engaged in a series of actions that in and of themselves seem unimportant. We see him playing cards, taking his son to school, advising a man involved in a hit and run incident. Then something of importance happens that leads to the climactic event of the film. To explain what this means would deprive the film of its tension, interest, and suspense. This includes the most interesting, beautiful, and mysterious scene in the film. The opening scene lasts some fifteen minutes. Then the film shifts four days into the past, and begins moving forward in time towards the opening scenes (which it basically presents to us a second time), then moving past them. In that context, the opening scenes are suddenly fraught with meaning and importance. Events that meant nothing now have great significance. Films that begin in the middle of the action and then shift back to the past to trace events that lead up to the opening present moment are not that rare. What is rare is to find a film that uses this device so effectively as Michael Clayton.

In certain ways Michael Clayton is formulaic. It presents us a theme we have seen before, that of a compromised man faced with the question of whether to redeem, himself, even if at the cost of his career or his life. What makes this film successful is how creatively and thoughtfully it works out the formula. This is a film of characters—of Clayton himself, his colleague Don Jeffries (Ken Howard), whose breakdown during a deposition precipitates a crisis, of Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the hyper-anxious and competitive CEO of the chemical company who is willing to resort to any means, however drastic or contemptible, to defeat her adversaries, of Clayton's friend and colleague Marty Bach (Sidney Pollack), who may also be his worst enemy, of many others, including a performance by a barely recognizable Michael O'Keefe.

The world of this film, where lawyers who love their families and do their best to lead responsible lives defend chemical companies that pollute the air and water and cause people to die, where CEOs plot assassinations, where a man who suffers a breakdown out of guilt and self-loathing becomes a problem when he turns against the company he is supposed to be defending, when a man's desire to protect and aid his brother becomes the means by which he is sucked in to deeper and deeper transgression.

In Michael Clayton the means by which the title character seeks redemption is itself a betrayal of the men who have betrayed him. Michael Clayton is still in trouble at the end of the film. We can't know exactly how that trouble will manifest itself. He climbs into a taxi and gives the driver a fifty dollar bill and asks to be driven around for as long as the fifty dollars will last. As the taxi twists and turns its way through the streets of New York City, another taxi follows closely behind. Is someone following him? Is this a coincidence? Probably—New York City is full of yellow taxis. Still, the taxi that is following the one in which he is riding is an emblem of what will be following (or that he might imagine as following him) for the rest of his life, however much longer that life might be.

Michael Clayton encourages paranoid fantasies about evil polluting mega-corporations. It invokes ideas and images of the mystery beyond the reality we inhabit—the mystery that might in the end help us make sense of the broken and compromised lives we live—even Clayton's eight-year-old son feels this.

George Clooney was nominated for Best Actor for his work in this film. (He won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Syriana). It's easy to think of Clooney as an actor with two faces: the comic face (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Oceans 11, 12, and 13) and the serious face (Syriana, The Good German, Good Night, and Good Luck). These may indeed be the two faces he has to work with. They are sufficient. In Michael Clayton Clooney is an extremely effective and distinguished actor.