- The Guardian,
- Friday February 15 2008
The tale of a worm that turned, with the unusual aspect that the burrowing invertebrate in question is George Clooney. Clooney is a weary fixer caught up here in one of those megadevious lawsuits with sleek lawyers defending big business illegality which will be familiar to those of you nose-deep in the middle of Damages on TV at the moment. Michael Clayton (the film, named after Clooney's character) concentrates on the practitioners caught up in a class action, the McGuffin in this case being a carcinogenic weedkiller. The dialogue, like so much in law, is hard to get a handle on: you have to adjust and refocus while you gradually discover what's up - also as in Damages, director/writer Tony Gilroy likes to flip you back and forward in time in a film that starts near its end.
- Michael Clayton
- Release: 2007
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 119 mins
- Directors: Tony Gilroy
- Cast: George Clooney, Sydney Pollack, Tilda Swinton, Tom Wilkinson
The way into these legal shenanigans for the viewer is through Tom Wilkinson's character, who kicks us off in voiceover. He's a man with a "chemical imbalance", appropriately enough for what the case's victims have gone through. In his case, it's a bipolar condition. There are pills to counteract this but, apparently sick to death after an endless 15 years as a litigating partner, he's stopped taking them. He has already stripped off in public (you can take the actor out of The Full Monty ...) and is threatening to reveal a lot more. As a writer, Gilroy has spent years picking his way through the Bourne trilogy and has even more devious material to get his teeth into here. His directorial debut is a dour and downbeat film about betrayal and compromise which comes at you with an atmosphere of foreboding that always feels real - this isn't Perry Mason or Atticus Finch, this is how real cases get handled.
Wilkinson is memorable playing the euphoric end of manic depression and Clooney fixes himself into a largely morose role, with no hint of his usual roguish twinkle. But it's Tilda Swinton, as Clooney's legal opponent, a woman as tightly wound as a spring - we see her rehearsing everything she's going to say in her bedroom mirror - who won the Bafta for best supporting actress award this week, perhaps as much for cumulative excellence as for this role. All three leads and Gilroy are among the film's seven Oscar nominations.
