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Janitor of lunacy

A quiet thriller for adults
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 23rd, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Landscape with fixer. Clooney commands the rough terrain in Michael Clayton.
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Michael Clayton

Directed by Tony Gilroy
With George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, Sydney Pollack and Ken Howard

In his recent collection of new essays, Hold Everything Dear, John Berger writes, “It is not only animal and plant species which are being destroyed or made extinct today, but also set after set of our human priorities. The latter are systematically sprayed, not with pesticides, but with ethicides — agents that kill ethics and therefore any notion of history and justice.”
Michael Clayton is a corporate fixer, a “janitor.” He was a promising trial lawyer who is now cleaning up the messes of his high-powered Manhattan law firm and its clients. When a wealthy business client runs over a jogger with his Porsche and races off, Clayton is dispatched to mop up.
We never learn why Clayton’s career took the turn it did, though it likely hinges on his excessive gambling, both with cards and with life. His most recent gamble was an attempt to start a bar with his brother (a man of different addictions) that has left Clayton owing $75,000 on a mob loan, which is now being called in.
On a drive through a tract of New York state countryside at daybreak, Clayton (George Clooney) sees three horses standing on a hill. He stops his car, gets out and walks up to the horses, as if seeking some connection with nature. The moment is brief, however — just as he reaches the horses, his car explodes.
Is it the work of a client, loan sharks or some other group? Director/writer Tony Gilroy’s film immediately goes back in time four days to stir the ashes of events leading up to the explosion.
Michael Clayton is a thriller, but not in the way of Gilroy’s most famous creation, the Jason Bourne series. It’s a quiet, almost contemplative drama of ethics — a moral thriller — that hasn’t space for adrenaline-drunk action, though the tension it produces still unsettles.
Amid Clayton’s current trials, he’s had to fly to Milwaukee to take control of a publicity disaster after one of his firm’s crack corporate lawyers, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), disrupted a deposition hearing by stripping naked. Edens has spent years defending the chemical giant UNorth against a class-action suit brought by farmers who believe they are being poisoned by the company’s cropsprays and fertilizer. Then Edens discovered documents that have riled his conscience.
Between calls from his boss, Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), and attempts to placate UNorth’s legal shill, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), Clayton tries to reason with the defiant and angry Edens. “You are a legend,” Clayton tells Edens. “I’m an accomplice,” he bitterly replies.
That UNorth has created a toxic agrichemical landscape and that people have died as a result is immaterial to both the company and its legal representatives. There’s no claim to responsibility until Edens’ act of presumed madness forces the issue.
You could say Michael Clayton is a film of immoral dilemmas, yet it’s also a bracing exploration of how humans are far too willing to sell themselves out to malice and tyranny. As in life, there is no “evil” in Gilroy’s film. There are simply flawed, frightened people making unconscionable decisions.
This excellent film could be more taut, as Gilroy makes too many detours into Clayton’s troubled family (which too happily includes a cop who will eventually help out). Otherwise, this is a near-perfect movie, complete with a superb cast.
Wilkinson and Pollack are both on top form, with Pollack again perfecting the type of sympathetic, though corrupt, executive figure that he played in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Though this is Clooney’s film — and the actor puts in his finest work to date as a sad-eyed, self-described janitor due for a moral epiphany — it’s Swinton’s performance that is truly stunning. Her Karen Crowder is a frightening portrait of a driven individual struggling, and failing, to self-hypnotize herself into becoming a bloodless automaton.
She’s seen on multiple occasions desperately trying to assume a veneer of sincerity, as she rehearses PR talking points and corporatespeak while applying her makeup in front of a mirror. It’s a malignant theatricality, though one that can’t fully disguise her humanity. In one scene, Crowder is alarmed to discover that she’s sweating, as if having forgotten that she’s made of flesh.
It’s rare to find a Hollywood film made with thinking adults in mind, particularly within the thriller genre. Michael Clayton has fixed that situation.     

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (23/01/2008):

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