2007 was an absurdly great year for movies: No Country for Old Men; There Will Be Blood; Zodiac; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; Juno; Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Offside; Gone Baby Gone; Killer of Sheep; Away from Her; and on and on. (There’s even 2 Girls 1 Cup for true completionists.) Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is one of the sleeper wonders of that year, neither the most immediately grand nor the most eagerly seized cult darling, but it’s a sleek, thoughtful, well-paced, and gratifyingly mature thriller.
Michael Clayton is a fixer–a “janitor,” he calls himself–at a high-profile law firm. He’s the guy who gets called to clean up messes like nasty hit-and-runs and attorneys who, in a worrying fit of psychiatric distress and conscience, are sabotaging their chances of settling multi-billion dollar lawsuits and potentially setting their clients up to take well-deserved criminal charges. It’s the latter case that provides the plot, as the usually impressive star lawyer Arthur Edens has a breakdown over representing U-North, an agricultural conglomerate accused of knowingly distributing carcinogenic weedkiller. Michael, like Arthur, is supposed to be a tool in his employers’ and clients’ hands, but the more he digs into the case, the more independent–and dangerous–he becomes. The plot is simple, even spare, and the menace is terrifyingly down-to-earth.
George Clooney does some of his best work here, trading his usual charisma and charm for a sense of drained and slowly recovered presence, as if Michael is slowly filling in a hollowed-out self and becoming human again. His opposite number is the dazzlingly great Tilda Swinton as U-North general counsel Karen Crowder. Swinton plays Karen with a distinctive and deeply felt blend of intelligence, terror, and neuroses; her ruthlessness comes from her gut-churning anxiety that all of this is going to blow up in her face. She will do anything to stop that from happening.
She will do anything, and Michael Clayton is just discovering that he won’t. This subterranean clash of professional personae and morals gives the film a lingering impact that makes it worthy of inclusion on the list of the best films of a very good year.
Michael Clayton is streaming on Netflix.
