Michael Clayton
Director: Tony Gilroy
Screenplay: Tony Gilroy
Running Time: 119 minutes
MICHAEL Clayton is the fix-it man for a large New York law firm Kenner, Bach & Odeen. Passed over for a partnership position due to his personal gambling habits, which in turn is compounded by a drug addled brother whom Michael has borrowed heavily from a loan shark to cover, things couldn’t get much worse. Of course, they do. His company are the defense team in a class action suite brought against U-North, a pesticide manufacturer whose in-house lawyer, Karen Crowder, is not only ambitious but will do anything to get the job done. Just as U-North is about to settle the $3 billion lawsuit out of court, Kenner, Bach & Odeen’s lead litigator Arthur Edens has a mental breakdown in court. And so the fun begins.
Clooney is methodic and has taken a risk playing a person who knows he’s not as nice/good as he could be, and Swinton, whose career seems to be going from strength-to-strength, certainly desereved to be nominated for the Oscar, but with such limited screen time, I was surprised she got it (then again, fellow Brit Dame Judy Dench got hers for about 10 minutes work in Shakespeare in Love). Stand out performance for me was the always reliable Tom Wilkinson as the nutty Eden, while the late Sydney Pollack gave his character a believably subdued nuance that others might have over acted with. The ending is slightly predictable, but doesn’t take away from the overall enjoyment of the pic.
4 stars out of 5
