Like his pal Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney pays the rent with mainstream baubles like the Ocean's movies, but his heart is clearly in the edgier, less commercial films to which he regularly returns. From Three Kings to Good Night and Good Luck to Syriana, Clooney has been particularly drawn to projects driven by their political and moral dimensions, and Michael Clayton is one more film fitting squarely in that mold.
A character study of a man defined by his compromises, Michael Clayton does double duty as an old-fashioned anti-corporate screed implicating all of us as either part of the problem or part of the solution. Clooney plays the eponymous character, a former prosecutor gone to seed and long reduced to working as a fixer for a big law firm. Clayton's the guy who arranges the pay-offs, orchestrates the hush-ups, smoothes over the edges, spins the spin and moves just outside the parameters of the legal system, making sure the wheels stay greased. His boss calls him a miracle worker, and his business cards read "special consultant," but Clayton will be the first one to tell you he's just a janitor.
Deep down, though, Michael Clayton knows he's become something far worse. "I'm a bagman," Clayton realizes to his utter disgust, but not until relatively late in the game, when the movie's series of escalating crises have all but forced him to face his demons. It's a no-brainer that Michael's in trouble from the first moment we see him — the GPS on his swanky Mercedes is on the blink, after all, which is movie-metaphor-ese for the guy's moral compass being out of whack — but half the pleasure of Michael Clayton is watching its title character's slo-mo meltdown lead up to that revelatory moment of painful self-knowledge.
The other half of the movie's pleasure takes the form of a curiously gripping conspiracy thriller that percolates on such an ominously low frequency it almost catches us off guard when it finally officially announces itself. The puzzle pieces come together slowly, with writer-director Tony Gilroy (screenwriter of the Bourne movies) nudging those pieces into motion, and as its plot begins to take shape, so too do Michael Clayton's themes. As it methodically chips away at the modern world's official version of itself, Gilroy's movie generates a sense of pervasive unease by focusing on its characters awakening to the terrible disparity between the way things appear to be and the way they actually are.
The film sucks us in through a series of these contrasts, beginning with a voice-over delivered by a man in full panic mode, his spontaneously combusting rant layered over orderly rows of neat, clean cubicles in an upscale law firm. The camera pans past the cold, clinical spaces in the corridors of power as the voice continues to spew its stream-of-consciousness nightmare scenario of fluid-soaked bodies, amniotic-fecal mazes and other visions of sticky corruption and moral decay.
The voice, we learn in time, belongs to Clayton's colleague, Arthur Evans (Tom Wilkinson), a veteran lawyer who's gone off the deep end, stripped himself naked at a deposition and mysteriously disappeared. It turns out Arthur's at the end of his rope, having spent the last six years of his life defending an agrochemical mega-corporation marketing itself as enviro-friendly while selling products that are riddling the population with cancer. Evans goes AWOL, begins secretly building a case against the very client he's supposed to be defending, and all hell breaks loose as a $3 billion class-action suit suddenly hinges on finding — and silencing — one legal loose cannon.
The burden of dealing with Evans falls to the fixer, of course, and it probably won't come as much of a revelation to learn that the renegade lawyer's actions serve to jumpstart Clayton's own ethical upheaval. What lies at the heart of Michael Clayton isn't ultimately that far removed from conventional socially conscious melodrama, but where the movie excels is in how it puts all this together, coming at the story from unexpected angles and neatly folding its sweeping political agenda into the personal struggles of its individual players: unhinged Arthur, Clayton himself and, perhaps most interestingly, the chief counsel for the chemical corporation (Tilda Swinton, gamely circumnavigating a Yankee accent).
Things get a bit overwrought from time to time (does Clayton really need gambling problems, a broken marriage and a junkie brother?) and, like too many other contemporary films, Gilroy's movie becomes considerably less interesting once its fractured narrative pieces finally come together.
Still, Michael Clayton rarely preaches (although you can tell it's dying to) as it surges ahead with the unnerving precision of a David Mamet thriller, complete with a Mamet-like understanding of the world in which it operates. Factor in one of Clooney's better performances and a tone that plumbs the depths of modern cynicism without ever losing sight of its characters' humanity, and you have a project with Oscar written all over it.
TIGLFF 2007: More to see
There's still more to see at the 18th annual Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which continues on both sides of the Bay through Sun., Oct. 14. Wednesday's screenings at Tampa Theatre include For the Bible Tells Me So (7 p.m.), a fascinating look at organized religion and homosexuality, followed by The Bubble (9 p.m.), an engaging if somewhat heavy-handed Romeo and Juliet romance between a Jewish Israeli and a gay Palestinian. Over at St. Pete's Muvico Baywalk, there's the weirdly dreamy Taiwanese import Spider Lilies (7:30) and Holding Trevor (9:30), a witty and irreverent dramedy about two gay pals and their gal pal roommate.
Highlights for Thurs., Oct. 11, include Finn's Girl (7 p.m., Tampa Theatre), a politically charged thriller about a workaholic lesbian with a small child to raise, a besieged abortion clinic to run and one or two secrets to unload. At Muvico Baywalk, there's the extremely controversial Portrait of Dorian Grey (7:30), which I wasn't able to preview but that might just wind up being either the most revered or most hated film of this year's festival.
A safer bet might be Nina's Heavenly Delights (Oct. 12, 7 p.m.), a glossy romance in which a lovely Indian lesbian returns to her picturesque Scottish hometown to dazzle the locals with her cooking skills, find the girl of her dreams and save the family business. It's all pretty predictable, in an ever so quaintly exotic way, but the actors are appealing, the production values high, and the scenes involving food or sex, both bathed in the same super-seductive soft-focus glow, are guaranteed crowd-pleasers.
I won't say much about the cheerfully inept Four Letter Word (Oct. 13, 7 p.m.), a "feel good" comedy populated almost exclusively by gay stereotypes — but don't miss the closing night film, Shelter (Oct 14, 7:30). This sensitively told coming-of-age/coming-out tale observes a young San Pedro skate-punk blossoming as a person and as an artist, and pulls down the curtain in fine style for another edition of what is still the Bay area's best film festival.
The 18th Annual Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival runs through Oct. 14 at Tampa Theatre, 711 N. Franklin St., Tampa; and Muvico Baywalk 20, 151 Second Ave. N., St. Petersburg. For a complete schedule, visit the festival's website: tiglff.com or call 813-879-4220.
This article appears in Oct 10-16, 2007.