Michael Clayton

STARRING: George Clooney, Tilda Swinton View Trailer RELEASE DATE: 10/12/2007 DATE SCREENED: 9/26/2007 The Verdict NOT GOOD - Wait for cable

Tony Gilroy takes the director’s chair for the first time with Michael Clayton. Tony has made his mark in Hollywood as a writer. Before writing/directing Michael Clayton, he was best known for scripting all three Bourne movies. There is a lot of advance “buzz” surrounding this film, but I didn’t like the plot of any of the Bourne movies. I know I’m in the minority with that opinion, but I only enjoy them for the action scenes. I have already forgotten the storyline of every Bourne film. Since Michael Clayton is a serious drama, I hoped it would have a story that I could get into.

George Clooney is Michael Clayton, a “fixer” at a large law firm in New York City. He basically has to handle any of the “dirty work” involved in a particular case. The film opens with him being called to assist a client who has been entangled in a hit-and-run accident and is looking for an alibi. This type of personal case is not Michael’s cup of tea, so he leaves after assigning it to someone else. On the drive back home, he pulls over to the side of the road when he is distracted by horses. After exiting the car and walking to the horses, the car explodes.

We are then taken back to 4 days earlier. One of the company’s top litigators, Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), seems to have gone crazy. He is arrested after jumping on a table naked at a meeting. He was working on the defense of a class action suit against a chemical company that is one of the firm’s biggest clients. Michael is good friends with Arthur and goes to bail him out of jail, while trying to cover for Arthur with the other law firm executives. It turns out that Arthur has been gathering evidence that they are on the wrong side of this class action lawsuit. The chemical company’s chief attorney, Karen (Tilda Swinton), is desperate to make sure this class action suit is settled, and hires a “fixer” of her own to watch Arthur. Arthur miraculously ends up dead of an apparent suicide. Michael suspects murder, and picks up the trail of clues that lead to the predicable conclusion.

The plot also has little sidebars that show that Michael has a gambling problem, and family issues involving his son. All of this adds up to a movie that is too long and way too boring. I almost dozed off a couple of times during the film. It seems that Tony Gilroy’s scripts just don’t resonate with me. I’m not a fan of the non-linear style of writing, in which nobody knows what is going on at the beginning and then you go back and try to explain everything. When you structure the story that way, the explanations better pay off, and here they don’t. I ended up wanting the story to be more about the chemical company’s chief attorney Karen, as opposed to Michael. She seems to have some serious issues that are worth more of an exploration. The acting performances are solid, but there are just too many uninteresting things going on for me to care. Wait for cable if you must see this one.

Notes:
Tony Gilroy himself attended the screening and did a Q&A session afterwards. The movie received polite applause at the end, I think more so because people knew he was there. He said he had been working on getting the film made for 8 years, and he loved it too much to turn it over to another director. He also planned to rename the film, but was never able to come up with a better title.