Middle-aged lawyer Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a
"fixer" who clears up complex or dirty cases on behalf of corporate
clients. But he has a number of personal and professional problems. His family
life is messy; he's a lone parent, his brother has run up large debts, he's
struggling with a gambling problem, his career appears to be going no-where -
and he has become tired of fixing other people's mistakes.
In "Michael Clayton," written and directed by Tony Gilroy, that conscience seems to have gone M.I.A., lost amid the dirty wheeling and dealing of a powerful New York law firm. . He works in that rarefied gray zone where the barely legal meets the almost criminal and takes lunch at the private club. Michael isn't a member of that club; he just mops up its mess, soothes its Botoxed brow and slips a fat envelope of thank you to inconvenient witnesses. There's a dirty kind of glamour to this world, with its rich trappings and its Ivy League smilers with their gutting knives. Its ugliness seduces as much as it repels and entertains.
Brilliant lawyer Arthur Edens (another powerhouse performance by Tom Wilkinson), representing a huge agro-chemical corporation being hit by a class action suit, has a bipolar breakdown, compounded by guilt over his defense of a company that is probably in the wrong, but is wealthy enough to buy its innocence either way. The company's CEO (Tilda Swinton) will stop at nothing to keep Edens from sinking the case. Clayton must decide how much of Edens's mad rebellion against the company is sheer mental illness, how much is true, and how much it will cost him to do the right thing.
Clayton narrowly survives an assassination attempt (when his car is blown up) and confronts one of the company directors, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), with evidence of corporate malfeasance. She offers to buy his silence but he is recording the conversation and she is arrested.
Favorite Quote From Movie: I AM SHIVA THE GOD OF DEATH !
