-Maff Caponi
Running counter to the entire culture of legal thriller and action movies alike, Michael Clayton features no dramatic courtroom scenes (or even a judge or jury, for that matter) and only one explosion (although we see it twice) to carry the audience’s attention. And it almost works.
This in itself is owed probably more to the solid acting that comes from every direction than the supposedly gripping and intense plot—if there was one, I feel slightly cheated. Nevertheless, the actors sell the movie much better than the writers ever could. Clooney is as good as he’s ever been (although it’s still not enough to redeem him from Ocean’s Twelve). Tom Wilkinson’s manic-depressive corporate-lawyer-on-a-crusade somehow manages to come off as both comical and disturbingly real enough (picture an overweight, middle-aged man yelling “I am Shiva, the god of war!” and stripping during a deposition hearing) while Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton outshines all of them as the slightly evil, career-focused legal head of a billion dollar company tangled up in a major class action lawsuit. All three were nominated for Oscars (although only Swinton walked out of the ceremony with a statue), though admittedly, these three are the only characters you will walk out of the theatre remembering; the more minor characters do very little, if anything, to memorialize themselves.
The plot is deep and involved and ends up just not working as well as it should. Clooney is an all-purpose “fixer,” sent in to solve any problematic situation that arises for his law firm—which, in this case, entails the apparent mental breakdown of their top lawyer (Wilkinson), who also happens to be handling a billion dollar class-action lawsuit against a billion dollar client. As it turns out, Wilkinson has been quietly developing a case against his clients whose product manages to cause cancer. It all seems reasonable enough and workable enough but the execution is just not there, Clooney’s career-re-re-defining performance notwithstanding.
Michael Clayton tries to take on a little too much and then manages to end in such a cliché fashion—exactly what it was trying to avoid all along. Were it not for the strong acting of Swinton and Clooney, this film would have been just another cheap legal thriller.