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Michael Clayton
(R)

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Corporate "janitors" Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack) and Michael Clayton
Michael Clayton is a sharp, smart, tense and superbly acted legal thriller-with-a-conscience, just the sort of movie for grown-ups Hollywood seldom bothers to make anymore. In it, plays the eponymous fixer for a high-powered Manhattan law firm -- or, as he puts it, a "janitor" -- called in to perform damage control when the firm's brilliant top litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson, in great form) suffers a full-on mental meltdown near the wind-up of a multi-million dollar class action suit against a major agrochemical company.

Agrochemical rep Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) will do what it takes to keep her job.
While Edens loses his senses (or does he come to them?) and slick agrochemical rep Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) maneuvers to save her corporate hide, Clayton's personal life is awash in gambling debts, a bad restaurant investment and a broken marriage. There are plot twists, double-crosses, legal switchbacks, a chase and even an explosion, but what's especially welcome about the movie is how it avoids John Grisham-style pyrotechnics and contrivances to instead give terrific actors like Clooney, Wilkinson, Swinton, Sydney Pollack and Denis O'Hare moody, oblique scenes that throw light on the shadowy side of corporate America.
Even if it doesn't rise to the level of the paranoid 1970s movies to which it aspires -- The Verdict and Three Days of the Condor spring to mind -- Michael Clayton's craft, intelligence, finesse, somber tone and refreshing lack of big, showy payoffs make it an impressive directing debut for Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter best known for adapting the Bourne trilogy. Moviegoers willing to be absorbed and intrigued rather than be numbed senseless should find Michael Clayton a film of many rewards.

by Stephen Rebello

photo: Myles Aronowitz/Warner Bros. Pictures


Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
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