You know its Award season when George Clooney puts away Danny Ocean’s tux and puts on the suit of an uncomfortable man facing moral quandaries from either outside forces or his own inner inadequacies. In this directorial debut from Tony Gilroy, writer of the Bourne trilogy, Clooney plays a man that has to deal with both. Michael Clayton is the kind of tightly wound legal thriller that every John Grisham adaptation aspires to be. If that doesn’t sound appealing enough, then consider this: Michael Clayton is one of the finest films released all year.



Clooney is Clayton, obviously. Clayton works for a powerful law firm as a kind of cleaner, in that he cleans up any mess created by the firm’s high profile (read: rich) clients. He’s called to Milwaukee when the lead attorney on a class action law suit against a chemical company seems to lose his marbles. Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) is a manic depressive that’s gone off his meds in light of some rather damning things he’s learned about the company, U North, in the process of pre-trial discovery. Everyone from the firm’s boss (Sydney Pollack) to U North’s chief counsel (Tilda Swinton) are telling Clayton to resolve the situation fast. But the man himself is starting to wonder if he’s on the right side.



Although there are many characters in the film, this is really a one man show: Clooney’s. As Clayton, he portrays a man who’s at his breaking point, he’s being dragged in several directions by forces outside of his control and it’s immediately known that Clayton is a man who’s not known for liking things being out of his control. It’s more this factor of loss of control that spurs Clayton to act as opposed to any kind of moral outrage. Clooney plays off his alpha movie star persona to fill Clayton’s shoes but looks a little more piqued and tired than usual. He’s a man under the wire, frenzied enough to be at lost but of nimble mind and still able to think in his feet.



Having said all that, I think that Wilkinson is in for some serious Award’s love in the next few months. He’s an incredibly sympathetic character, even though a couple of days prior to the film’s beginning he probably wasn’t so much. Usually we see people in movies have cathartic moments, but rarely do we see the full blown aftermath of one in such star-spangled glory. Wilkinson takes Arthur on an emotional trip that swings from righteous indignation to the depths of depression and regression.



The story itself requires no special Rube Goldberg-like mindset in order to understand and follow what’s going on, just so long as your attention span is longer than that of an ADD suffer (or Halo 3 player), you’ll be fine. I notice that a lot of these conspiracy thriller-like movies tend to go overboard with the details, blinding us with science as it alternates hot and cool, taking us to an ending that twists hinge on some small detail nobody noticed in the first 20 minutes. This is a lawyer film that’s not really about the law, or the cover-up, or notions of the corporate culture run amok, it’s about how all of that impacts the people that play the game.



If you want to see a solid movie with tremendous performances you cannot possible do better at the cinema right now than Michael Clayton. It’s the best John Grisham movie that John Grisham never wrote and if you’ve ever seen the Pelican Brief or the Chamber then maybe that’s a good thing.