Directed by Tony Gilroy, this movie got Tilda Swinton an Oscar and I kind of feel like it should have gotten more people involved with it more Oscars. I couldn't understand, before seeing it, how there could be such a thing as a legal thriller that was "quiet," but after viewing, I completely get it. Although the film is "Insider"-esque in its intense portrayal of the power inherent in corporations with lots of money, there's also the compelling moral journey of this Michael Clayton character.
Clayton/Clooney is an outsider in a monied world, sort of a hired legal thug who "fixes" problems that arise for his big-fancy-pants law firm (problems like undocumented nannies, drunken car accidents, etc). When he's asked to "fix" a problem involving his friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a senior lawyer at the firm who's gone off his medication and begun to blather about how the firm is wrong to be defending U-North, a giant pesticide company, against a multi-plaintiff lawsuit, Clayton begins to have second thoughts about his life. The best parts are the ones where he goes to family reunions at shabby suburban houses in upstate NY, or interacts with his cop brother, or has man-to-man talks with his little son (I told Nick that one particular conversation of theirs was one of the only on-screen parent-child sentimentalities I've ever felt moved by).
One problem only—the movie has a weirdly inverted structure—there's an intro, and then a "four days earlier" screen, a la "Alias"—which feels unnecessarily "Memento" and unneeded.
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