Dark in color, mood and outraged worldview, Michael Clayton is a film that speaks to the way we live now. Or at least, the way certain masters of the universe do, as they prowl the jungle in their sleek rides, armed with killer instincts and the will to power. It's a story about ethics and their absence, a slow-to-boil requiem for American decency in which George Clooney, the ultimate in luxury brands and playboy of the Western world, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good. Well, someone's got to do it.
And Clooney, who smartly moved away from star-making nonsense like The Peacemaker as soon as he could, has in recent years proved that it's possible to play outwardly different, seemingly contradictory roles (glamorous, righteous) while hopscotching from Hollywood to Darfur and back. You have to be clever to pull this off, and you have to have clever friends like Steven Soderbergh, with whom Clooney created the production company Section Eight. Now defunct, Section Eight dropped bombs, uncorked bubbles, supported independent voices and mucked about in television (K Street). With Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Good German and now Michael Clayton it also helped Clooney create a singularly contemporary screen identity as a man of unquiet conscience.
In Michael Clayton, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, that conscience seems to have gone MIA, lost amid the dirty wheeling and dealing of a powerful New York law firm. Michael (Clooney) is the firm's designated fixer, though he likes to call himself its janitor. He works in that rarefied gray zone where the barely legal meets the almost criminal and takes lunch at the private club. Michael isn't a member of that club; he just mops up its mess, soothes its Botoxed brow and slips a fat envelope of thank you to inconvenient witnesses. There's a dirty kind of glamour to this world, with its rich trappings and its Ivy League smilers with their gutting knives. Its ugliness seduces as much as it repels and entertains.
Gilroy's previous writing credits include the Bourne franchise and the goofily entertaining legal thriller The Devil's Advocate. (Keanu Reeves is the advocate; Al Pacino, the other guy.) Michael Clayton marks his debut as a director, a gig that seems to have inspired him to watch (rewatch) old Sidney Lumet films. Though Michael is more upscale, smoother around the edges (he probably doesn't own white tube socks), he's a variation on those soulfully alone Lumet cops and lawyers who fight the system and struggle to do the right thing, though not necessarily because they want to. The world Michael wanders in is so darkly sinister, as perilous as that in Lumet's Q & A, that his black coat and suit melt into shadows as depthless as an abyss.
It is an abyss, Gilroy suggests, largely of our own making. There are a few obvious, almost too obvious, villains in Michael Clayton, notably the chief counsel for an agrochemical giant, Karen Crowder, played with twitches and rolls of gut fat by a mesmerizing Tilda Swinton. A Lady Macbeth in pumps and discreet pearls, Karen has pledged her troth to her corporate masters instead of a murderous husband. She's a cliche - brittle, sexless, friendless, cheerless and all the rest - but what makes her work is her unnerving banality, visible in the blank canvas of a face that looks untouched by gentleness or empathy. This is a pitiful creature, as unloved by her writer-director creator as by the genius actress who plays her.
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