SINCE 1999, George Clooney has appeared in films with the highest ratings of any major actor reviewed by The Post’s critics. Not all of them have been financial or critical successes, but an impressively healthy proportion of them (“Three Kings,” “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck”) have challenged Clooney as an actor – as well as challenging Hollywood’s assumption that audiences these days don’t like to think very hard when they go to the movies.
“Michael Clayton,” a sharply written, twisty legal thriller and the auspicious directing debut of Tony Gilroy (who wrote all three “Bourne” pictures), definitely falls into this category.
There’s not much in the way of crowd-pleasing action in what amounts to as much of a character study as a thriller. And it requires the audience to pay close attention to a complicated story.
There are more than ample rewards for discerning adults: Some of the best dialogue in a recent movie and a gallery of unforgettable performances.
Chief among them is Clooney’s most nuanced work as the title character, a man forced to confront his choices at a very vulnerable point in his life.
Clayton is employed by a major Manhattan law firm where he has worked 17 years without making partner.
A weary 45-year-old former prosecutor, he’s a compulsive gambler who has just lost a restaurant he co-owned with his junkie brother – and faces losing a lot more than that.
Our hero self-deprecatingly calls himself a “janitor,” and his bosses value his ability to navigate the system and work his contacts to clean up clients’ messes in ways that avoid court appearances.
But Michael’s latest assignment awakens him from what seems to have been a lengthy moral slumber.
He’s been asked to take charge of Arthur, the firm’s top litigator, who has suddenly turned into a liability.
Played by the great Tom Wilkinson in a manner reminiscent of Peter Finch’s mad anchorman in “Network,” Arthur has gone off his meds.
He’s stripped off his clothes at a deposition for a case he’s been handling for years, defending a giant chemical company against a class-action lawsuit brought by the families of people killed by a pesticide.
What starts as a routine damage-control assignment for Clayton gets complicated when Arthur reveals he has a smoking gun that will explode their client’s case.
The chemical company’s nervous chief counsel, played with frightening intensity by Tilda Swinton, doesn’t trust Clayton, who comes from a family of cops. So she ruthlessly orders an extralegal solution to the Arthur problem.
This shocks even the blasé Clayton, but his financial situation is worsening. Offering a bailout is one of the firm’s founders (Sydney Pollack), who nonchalantly admits, “We knew this case reeked from the beginning” but needs it resolved to proceed with a lucrative merger.
Does Clayton take the money and run? We know the stakes are very high early in the film, when Gilroy offers an intriguing flash-forward showing Clayton’s car exploding.
This is a movie that thrives not on cheap melodramatics but on ideas and a more deliberate pace than most contemporary mainstream movies.
When Clayton revisits the scene of the explosion near the end of the movie and the missing pieces are filled in, the results are haunting.
There are a few loose ends, notably an undeveloped subplot about the divorced Clayton’s struggle to remain connected with his son, which should have been cut.
That’s a small complaint about a movie as satisfying as “Michael Clayton,” which lives up to its ambitions in many ways.