Review: Michael Clayton

A terrifically acted character study that offers little else to reward the movie-goer, except perhaps a nagging sense of being an idiot.

As a technical exercise in its genre, Michael Clayton is excellent. The script is tight, the direction is flashy, the cinematography is cold, and the acting is uniformly good. It’s a shame that, despite this, the film never rises above ticking the boxes, and ends up as a moderately entertaining legal thriller that has a story branded with the dreaded ‘C’ word – Conventionality.

George Clooney is at his best, trading in his matinee-idol goofy charm to become a beleaguered workaholic with an unpleasant divorce being the least of his regrets. Opposite him are Tom Wilkinson as a brilliant attorney turned mad (mad, or just passionate?), and Tilda Swinton as an unattractive career woman (‘career woman’ doesn’t qualify the unattractiveness – she’s just cold). Swinton’s performance is the film’s best; when we first meet her, she’s rehearsing a speech in the mirror, and we never quite get to see a true personality under that blank façade until fear flashes in her eyes.

Tony Gilroy’s plot (scripter of all Bourne films) is engaging enough, but tries to disguise its conventionality with mysterious lines of dialogue and obscure back-stories. The first thirty minutes, in particular, are difficult to follow. Such narrative complexity grows tiresome.

To make matters worse, there’s an early flashback scene where Michael suddenly jumps out of his car to look at some horses. Anyone hoping that this will be explained later will be sorely disappointed. Is it a moment of deep metaphor, or does Michael just have an aesthetic appreciation of fine equine beasts – he must be a tortured artiste underneath. There is no reason for this, and in a legal thriller where everything is ‘real’ and ‘practical’, it’s most certainly a low point.

The horse-thing may seem minor, but plot-wise it’s crucial. And the randomness of said event underlines the weakness in a script that takes itself far too seriously and never once realizes that it’s just a simple evil-corportation-legal-thriller; well made, but no more useful than Erin Brockovich or countless others.