Film blows whistle on internal battle

Clooney’s troubled Michael Clayton comes off lean, sleek and unapologetically smart

Tom Wilkinson’s acting (right) stands out in the corporate psych-thriller
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Tom Wilkinson’s acting (right) stands out in the corporate psych-thriller

In a growing crop of movies that cater to the woefully short attention span of today’s public by assaulting your senses with music, video, photography and tired plot gimmicks, it’s encouraging to find a movie that stands confident in the power of its script and its actors. Michael Clayton, George Clooney’s latest venture into acting is if nothing else, unabashedly confident.

Opening with an emotive, if enigmatic, voice-over monologue from Tom Wilkinson regarding his nervous breakdown, the film immediately establishes an atmosphere of restrained intensity that never slackens. We are shown a surreal glimpse of Manhattan at midnight—the empty board-rooms and hallways of a prestigious law firm—an invitation to a world removed from our own, at the same time fantastical and alarmingly real. This is the world occupied by Michael Clayton (George Clooney): a “fixer” of the sensitive problems faced by an elite clientele. After this mysterious introduction, the audience is returned to Clayton’s life four days prior.

The story revolves around Clayton confronting, and pacifying, his mentor (Wilkinson), who suffers a psychological break when defending a corporation guilty of poisoning the drinking water of farmlands in the Midwest. So stricken was his mentor by an attack of conscience that he strips naked in a deposition, shouting obscenities and making claims that he is the god of death. Though Wilkinson’s character admittedly has a history of mental instability, the case begins to take an equal toll on Clayton. Seeing his mentor in shambles yet at times penetratingly cogent, he starts to question the parasitic role he and his firm have in the world. By no means is the film a feel-good, Jerry Maguire-esque journey of self-worth. Rather, an embittered cynicism stays with Clayton throughout the film. As the defendant company furiously tries to contain the situation and escape the lawsuit, it targets the lives of Clayton’s mentor, now bent on revealing their guilt, and even Clayton himself. This leaves him torn between what is right and what is profitable.

The realism of the film is its most compelling asset. The actors punish the audience with their intensity yet never reduce themselves to overacting or cheap emotional showboating. Director Tony Gilroy, who wrote the equally subdued screenplays of the three Bourne movies, pens a script that allows the actors to be natural, with no need to improve the potency of his words by shouting. The dialogue stands on its own with confidence rarely displayed since Michael Mann’s brilliant, and similarly textured, The Insider. Overall, the pace of the film drags a little in the middle, but can be forgiven thanks to the interesting cinematography. Minimal in flash, the camera still exhibits style as unconventional, stationary shots are allowed to linger for an anxiously long time on a scene, conveying an unsettling sense of Clayton’s disheveled reality.

Although Clooney is solid in the lead, the supporting cast carries more than its fair share of the load. While Tilda Swinton (a neurotic officer from the defendant company) and Sydney Pollack (Clayton’s cutthroat boss) deliver fine performances, it is Tom Wilkinson who really stands out. He possesses a mesmerizing intensity in his rhythms of speech and lends an enigmatic gravitas to his role of the insane man with the sanest view of the situation.

The final shot of the movie rests silently on a single character’s face for upwards of two minutes as the credits begin to roll. Such quiet confidence makes Michael Clayton strongly compelling and evocative. It allows nuanced performances and a finely-tuned script to take hold and pervade the mind of the viewer. Michael Clayton is a rare commodity in film: lean, sleek and unapologetically smart.

Michael Clayton is playing at Empire Theatres Capitol 7, 223 Princess St.

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