Usually, a movie with George Clooney automatically means goodness (Ocean’s Eleven, Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana, to name a few), but such movies couldn’t be crafted without substantial work by Hollywood writers. Led by writer/director Tony Gilroy (The Bourne Ultimatum), Michael Clayton is a fully realized, complex film with enough character development to make every actor shine.
Gilroy, a longtime writer and first-time director, said in an interview with The Diamondback that the opportunity to direct “was everything.”
“I’ve been the writer, the original writer on a movie, and you see somebody else’s name come up and you go, ‘What the f— is this?'” Gilroy said of his switch from writing to directing. Instead, directing gives “the whole prize” to someone, he added.
With Michael Clayton, Gilroy focuses on the title character (Clooney), who functions as a “fixer” for a large corporation in New York City; he’s basically a male version of Jodie Foster’s character from Inside Man. Clayton is having a pretty rough time: He owes thousands of dollars to his shady restaurant financier, Gabe Zabel (played by The Wire’s Bill Raymond), and his latest assignment, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson, The Last Kiss), is a deranged lawyer threatening to derail a $3 billion case. The film then follows Michael as he tries to “fix” these problems while his company and another called U/North prepare to merge, an arrangement orchestrated by the very anxious Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton, The Man from London).
What’s most impressive about Michael Clayton is the immense amount of character development pumped into each role, from major to minor. It is a rare thing to spend as much as five minutes on a secondary character like Crowder as she obsessively rehearses for an interview, but it is scenes such as those that make Michael Clayton such a strong film. Though the film is marketed as a thriller – “There’s death, there’s danger, there’s tension; it’s not The Hours,” Gilroy said – it almost comes off as a character study.
Yet the film’s strength is also its major weakness, as it can come off too analytical and cold. Much like the Bourne films, the majority of the characters in Michael Clayton are composed, intelligent people who speak carefully, calmly and with deadly consequences. However, this makes the film well-crafted but also over-intellectual and even causes the film to drag a bit.
The one exception to this rule is Wilkinson as the unhinged Edens – passionate and wild, Wilkinson seems like he’s visiting from another movie. For example, his opening voice-over sounds like an over-emphatic spoken word poem, and that’s a compliment. As Gilroy said, “Tom’s [character is] really out there. … Everybody else in the film is trying to cover things over, … so it’s sort of natural that his vocabulary would be a little different.”
And though the film’s direction is simplistic and even a little old-fashioned, there is an unusual touch at the end of the film which symbolizes Gilroy’s entire production.
While adults have been hard to get into the theater lately – 3:10 to Yuma, The Brave One and even the extremely well-reviewed Eastern Promises all opened to disappointing box office results – hopefully Clooney’s name will draw audiences to Michael Clayton. Grim and focused, Clooney does a fine job showing us just enough of the title role so audiences relate to him, yet don’t totally understand him. More importantly, however, audiences will remember him – and that’s the entire point.
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