Michael Clayton

It seems passivity is the enemy here, and there's enough of it to spare in Michael Clayton, a law thriller that uncoils gradually, and reveals suddenly. Everyone has the 'whoops' factor tied around their little finger, where nothing said or done has any connection to them. This includes the eponymous lead, played by George Clooney, who is loyal to his friends and practically useless to anyone else.

Michael is what is called a 'fixer,' which is a dodgy job description if I ever heard one, and of questionable legality. When someone messes up, their lawyer sends him in to manipulate, tweak, and shift the story in their favor. For instance, an upper class married man 'thinks' he hit someone with his car. Instead of coming to see the victim is okay, the driver (Mr. Greer) drives home and contacts his lawyer, who contacts Michael.

"What do they do if the car is stolen?" Mr. Greer reasons. "Happens all the time." Michael senses that he is in tpo deep then, so leaves the man to solve it for himself. He has more personal matters to attend to. The body (?) is never recovered, or maybe it's just a miffed drunk staggering home. It seems for these people, this is more plot point than climax.

In this case, Michael Clayton tries to find what Mr. Greer hit, but he is violently interrupted. Then the film is taken back four days, in a tangle of a story that seems like it will never be explained, but is. In the time before that incident, Michael is living his ordinary life of 'fixing' and pawning of his personal belongings, trying evade bankruptcy.

Then he gets a phone call, and is told that his friend and legendary fellow lawyer, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson,) has left his manic-depressive medication and gone bonkers. To be more specific, he stripped down during a law hearing and proclaimed his love for the plaintiff, the much younger Anna Kysersun, then chasing her and her company through the streets with inexplicable motivations.

Apparently that's not the worst part. While Arthur was shedding his attire in a fit of mania, he also had a moment of clarity- that he had the power to stop the evil that is been taken place, and as people probably suspected, that the cancer Anna and her family have been plagued by (which has already taken the life of her mother and brother) is in fact a direct result of U-North, a 'very safe' weed killer Clayton, Edens and others have been supporting.

U-North's weed killer, which is accompanied by green, reassuring advertisements, was used by Anna and many others on family farms, and got into their water streams. Worse for the corporation, Arthur doesn't only know what's going on, he has proof for it (a piece of paper showing that U-North knew, too) and has reached a quasi-midlife crisis where he's started questioning the morality of the stuff he's been doing for years.

Kenner, Back, & Ledeen (the law firm they work for) has funded U-North and they stand to lose a lot of money if the corporation comes crashing down. As good friends as Michael and Arthur are, Michael is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and can't afford to lose more, and his reaction is less 'it's not true' than 'we promised we wouldn't talk about it.'

Arthur, off his meds and with a perhaps not perennial sense of purpose, abandons Michael as a lost cause and enlists Anna's help to expose all the people who have been hurt with the pesticide (Anna is a real sport about Arthur's infatuation and clothes-shedding incident, though I couldn't tell if she really liked him or sensed she shouldn't be on his bad side.)

This makes him the not most popular person of U-North, and shady action against him by the nervous, twitch-ridden, and chilly Karen Crowder (the always chilly Tilda Swinton, who nevertheless seems mild-mannered enough for one one to think she knows less than she knows.) Michael Clayton does damage control, trying to to call Arthur into his right mind to support a deplorable lie.

The film is sort of brilliant the way it that it creates spontaneous, deliberately awkward dialogue that is usually nit picked and glossed over by the movie. At first, this promises to only be the norm with the Bipolar character, Arthur, but it soon spreads over into universal nervousness. of course, the characters have a lot to be nervous about. never has stumbly screenwriting and unnecessary 'uh's and 'er's impressed me more.

As with just about any film thriller, the script obscures truth from the characters, and their intellect suffers increasingly agitating pitfalls. Of course, the Arthur character has just escaped the numbing effects of his mood stabilizers and is 'feeling' the world for the first time in ages, so a little imprudence can be expected of such big adjustments.

However, the others, stressed as they might be, play aggravatingly dumb and don't provoke sympathy as often as a sharp "Really? Are you that stupid?" The performances are very good- nothing unusual from Tilda Swinton (she's playing her White Witch with a couple quirks.) George Clooney was just fine and doesn't need guff from people who think he just a ladies man with a self-important ego (maybe so, maybe not, but let's not judge, shall we?)

Tom Wilkinson strikes a balance between vulgar and vulnerable, and does well both feigning an American accent (he's British) and conducting his shallow, disorganized, and ridiculously fast speech, which gives the feeling he believes the oxygen is being pulled out of the air. And cliche is sidestepped when Michael's son Henry, a smart alecky and precocious kid, doesn't fall victim to 'child in trouble' script, and is at no point threatened, menaced and ransomed (Rated R.)