Writer-director Tony Gilroy Famously conceived of the premise for his 2007 film "Michael Clayton" while working on the script for the 1998 Al Pacino horror thriller "The Devil's Advocate." The story is that while doing background research, he encountered a "fixer" — the guy tasked to do all the shit jobs no one else wanted to do — at a tony New York law firm. The seed was thus planted.
Interestingly, you could interpret "Michael Clayton" as a more real-world companion to "The Devil's Advocate." But whereas the first movie is a cartoon (an intensely entertaining cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless), "Michael Clayton" manages to be truly terrifying in that its depiction of corporate avarice is so unnervingly plausible.
At its core, "Michael Clayton" is a pretty standard paranoid legal thriller of the John Grisham/Scott Turrow variety — which is probably why it didn't get a lot of Oscar notice in the year of "No Country For Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood." No new ground is paved here. But it's just so much better than the genre typically allows. Gilroy is one of the sharpest writers working in Hollywood today and has been hovering at or near the A-list for nearly two decades. Watching him play with words is sort of like being a teenage guitar student and hearing Jimi Hendrix for the first time. Tom Wilkinson's manic opening monologue is just so jarringly excellent — the sort of writing that makes me want to pack it in and become a beet farmer because I just know I'll never be that good.
"Michael Clayton" was Gilroy's first time in the director's chair, but you would never guess it. The movie is slick and self-assured in a way that, by rights, should only come after decades of experience. The performances are note-perfect, and it manages to be visually stylish without every becoming gimmicky.
At the center of this film are a group of four shockingly good performances. Sidney Pollack reminds us that he was always an actor first, and both Wilkinson (as a bipolar senior partner) and Tilda Swinton (as a conflicted but corrupt corporate executive) prove why they are two of the best actors working in Hollywood today. But Clooney is the revelation here. I've always sort of liked him, but I've always really thought of him more as a movie star than a true master of his craft. But he manages to invert his star charisma here and present us with the sort of jaded everyman we've become accustomed to seeing Paul Giamatti play. There's a harried, worn-in quality to his performance that rings completely true.
If you missed this one when it came out in favor of the splashier Oscar bait from that year, I'd say go back and give it a look.
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