Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Clooney is superb as flawed lawyer in 'Clayton'

To understand just how unusual a movie "Michael Clayton" is, there are a few moments when you feel sorry for lawyers on retainer to an evil corporation.

To understand just how unusual a movie "Michael Clayton" is, there are a few moments when you feel sorry for lawyers on retainer to an evil corporation.

Those feelings don't last long, of course, and it helps that one of the lawyers is George Clooney.

Clooney, it must be said, has turned into a darn good actor - the rare leading man whom women love and men respect, though in "Clayton" he seems eager to leave suave, confident Danny Ocean far behind.

Here, Handsome George has the title role as an ex-neighborhood guy and former prosecutor whose sharp elbows and street smarts have won him a position at a top New York City law firm.

Not as a litigator, or rainmaker, or even a partner, but a kind of fixer - he's the guy who makes late-night visits to valued clients who've just left the scene of a hit-and-run.

He probably had the smarts to be a first-rate litigator, but he has his demons - we see that he's divorced, and there are cryptic references to a gambling problem. And as the movie opens he's staring at a bad note on a busted restaurant, meeting with the kind of lender you don't find through the Better Business Bureau.

Director Tony Gilroy's slick, smart script doesn't explain too much about "Clayton." He allows Clooney to fill in the details, and allows suggestive lines of dialogue to gather meaning as the movie rolls along, and as a thriller develops.

When the genius lawyer (Tom Wilkinson) handling the firm's biggest case - protecting a corporate polluter against legitimate wrongful death suits - goes off his meds and off the reservation, Clayton is brought in to locate and baby-sit the man, to protect the firm's interests and reputation.

Billions of dollars in damage claims are riding on Clayton's assignment, and he begins to believe that he does not have the confidence of the corporation in-house counsel (Tilda Swinton) or even his own boss (Sydney Pollack, in an excellent supporting turn).

Best not to give away too much, but Clayton learns the hard way that he's dispensable and faces daunting moral choices that seem to make self-preservation and justice mutually exclusive.

It's difficult to say exactly what kind of movie this is - there's a thriller in there, with exploding cars and wet-workers and double-crosses, but there are also small, vivid, surprising moments of character revelation featuring Clayton with his colleagues and his estranged family.

But it's not hard to say that the movie is very, very good, coasting along on Gilroy's fine dialogue and Clooney's top-notch performance as a broken-down lawyer making a desperate, white-knuckled grasp at dignity, the best of its kind since Paul Newman's turn in "The Verdict." *

Produced by Sydney Pollack, Jennifer Fox, Steven Samuels, Kerry Orent, written and directed by Tony Gilroy, music by James Newton Howard, distributed by Warner Bros.