KeswickFilmClub.org

There's a revealing moment in Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon where studio boss Monroe Stahr (inspired by MGM's Irving Thalberg) instructs the contemptuous British novelist George Boxley (based on Aldous Huxley) in the art of movie-making by casually spinning out a succession of intriguing images. 'Go on,' said Boxley, smiling. 'What happens?' 'I don't know,' said Stahr. 'I was just making pictures.'

Writer-director Tony Gilroy, screenwriter on the three Bourne thrillers, grabs our attention this way in his authoritative directorial debut Michael Clayton, with a succession of fascinating, unexplained shots.
First, there are images of a glossy, deserted New York office building at night with a voice-over of a man talking in a demented fashion about a crazy event he's been involved in and how he feels covered in the filth of corporate society. The montage concludes on the one floor where there's frenzied activity in a smart law firm that is revealed, through a phone call from the Wall Street Journal taken by the chief honcho (Sydney Pollack), to be on the verge of a merger.

We then see a troubled woman (Tilda Swinton) examining in a mirror the large damp patches in the armpits of her shirt, before the camera cuts to a smartly dressed man (George Clooney) in a seedy warehouse poker game being asked about a restaurant he's been forced to sell. On quitting the game, Clooney takes a call on his mobile which tells him to get out to Westchester County where a rich guy has fled the scene of an accident. This man turns out to be aggressive and peremptory, having been told that Clooney will immediately resolve all his problems. But Clooney remains cool and in command. 'I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor,' he says, a line that will echo throughout the movie.

Driving back to New York after sunrise, Clooney stops in the countryside to commune with three horses, an image that suggests his envy of their freedom, though we note they are wearing bridles. Suddenly, 100 yards away, his Mercedes explodes. Why? Well, Tony Gilroy knows and, 100 minutes later, he'll bring us back to this spot after an extended flashback that will explain what happened in the preceding four days.
He has followed Hitchcock's advice about bombs in movies. He has got over the shock and now exploits the suspense and the mystery. We feel we've had a good time even before the narrative has actually begun.

What we have at the heart of this excellent thriller is a story of greed, the misuse of the law, the contempt of the powerful for the weak and the small window of decency through which such things can be corrected. Clooney is the eponymous 45-year-old Michael Clayton, son of an Irish-American cop, product of a minor law school, experienced in handling crime as an assistant district attorney and now a dependable, highly paid troubleshooter for one of New York's most prestigious law practices.

His friend, the firm's finest litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has spent six years working for a multinational chemical company called UNorth, against whom a multibillion-dollar class action is being brought by 450 farmers who believe they've been poisoned by a toxic product. But he's become unhinged and appears to be working for the other side. Clayton, who's burdened with problems of his own (a broken marriage, big debt incurred by his restaurant, an alcoholic brother), is charged with bringing Arthur home from Milwaukee and getting him back on the medicine that controls his bipolar condition.

Meanwhile, his opposite number, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), chief legal counsel for UNorth, is on Arthur's trail. To get where she is, Karen has had to sacrifice her soul, her conscience, her inner life to achieve the necessary ruthlessness and poise; this is superbly conveyed through a series of scenes in which she's shown alone in a hotel room, anxiously rehearsing for an interview she's giving for television.

As Karen moves further and further into transgressive territory, talking to her lethal aides in protective euphemisms worthy of David Mamet, so Michael comes to question the ethics of his current profession and to recover the integrity that informed his earlier life. This may sound schematic, even sentimental, but Swinton and Clooney find real depth in their characters. The narrative takes on a moral force without anyone pausing to indulge in fancy rhetoric to explain or justify their conduct.

Interestingly, Clooney has been playing on both sides of the moral fence in recent films. In comic vein in movies like Ocean's Eleven and Out of Sight, he celebrates cool amorality. His more personal pictures, such as Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana, take a highly principled view of civic responsibility. Likewise, Sydney Pollack has for years been making movies, from Three Days of the Condor through Absence of Malice to The Firm, that criticise the abuse of power. Yet as an actor, he specialises in playing (very convincingly) cruel, cynical, corrupt lawyers and business tycoons in pictures like Eyes Wide Shut, Changing Lanes and A Civil Action, in which he famously crushes John Travolta, an idealistic lawyer involved in a class action case.

The film is discreetly lit by Robert Elswit, who received an Oscar nomination for his black-and-white cinematography on Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck, and it's expertly edited by the director's brother, John Gilroy. The Gilroys' father, Frank, wrote The Subject Was Roses, the 1964 Pulitzer-winning play which made the reputation of the 24-year-old Martin Sheen.

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, the movie is as much a character study as a suspense drama. Stars have meaning, at least the best stars do, and at this point just placing Clooney in a movie suggests something about the individual versus entrenched corruption. Gilroy doesn't have to be explicit and doesn't have to be preachy. Just by casting Clooney, he invites audiences to see the story in terms of its moral and social implications.

The story revolves around a pending case in which Clooney's firm - headed by, of course, Sydney Pollack as the top lawyer - is defending an agrochemical company against a class-action suit worth billions of dollars. The agrochemical company is in the wrong, but it's almost guaranteed to win, until one of the law firm's partners (Tom Wilkinson) goes off his medication and, driven by conscience, starts feeding information to the other side. Clayton's job is to talk down the wayward partner, to get him back on his medication and back working for the home team.

Clooney is not alone up there. In their respective scenes with Clooney, Pollack and Wilkinson are top-notch sparring partners - Clooney has to be on his toes, or they'll steal the scenes from him. And Tilda Swinton, as the chief counsel for the agrochemical company, is just outstanding. Though the villain of the piece, she takes viewers into her mental process - her obsession with the bottom line to the exclusion of every other human consideration - and we see the small, terrified person under the hard corporate facade. The scenes of her dressing and rehearsing her presentations are both chilling and pathetic.

But it's Clooney's movie. In addition to exploiting everything we already know and like about Clooney, Gilroy comes up with new things for him to do - such as losing his cool, getting nervous and coming up against forces that he can neither charm nor evade. We see Clooney as the father of a young son (a regular kid, not the usual Hollywood brat, played by Austin Williams), urgently offering the boy advice and encouragement. Gilroy even invites audiences to contemplate Clooney's face, as though he were Garbo at the end of Queen Christina, with an endless close-up of him riding in a cab.

Until now, Gilroy, a screenwriter, has never directed a movie, and a case could be made that he did not do himself any favors by directing his script this time. The first hour drags a bit, and plot movements could be clearer. Yet I doubt another director would have handed the movie to Clooney in such an overt way, and the result is something valuable: the ultimate showcase for the defining male lead of our time.