It’s only seeing a film aimed squarely at adults that makes you realise the degree to which most really aren’t. Michael Clayton, whatever it’s faults or merits, is definitely such a one - it’s solid and intelligent, telling a provocative story with little in the way of thrills or fireworks. And it makes demands on the attention that, while not unreasonable, are probably enough to turn off a fair chunk of the cinema-going audience.
Writer / director Tony Gilroy, fresh from screenwriting the Bourne trilogy and making his directorial debut here, has crafted a movie with the rare quality that it never once talks down to the viewer. The impression is that Gilroy would rather have you scratching your head than feeling patronised - not that there’s anything terribly complicated, but there are large chunks of dialogue that rely on jargon or context, or only make full sense in retrospect.
Gilroy opens with a series of intriguing scenes: a major legal case is about to be brought to a close; Michael Clayton, in his capacity as a corporate fixer, visits a client who’s just been responsible for a hit and run; as he drives away, he stops by the roadside, and while he’s out of his car it explodes. Shifting back four days, we learn that Clayton is growing tired of his morally dubious occupation, as is attorney Arthur Edens, whose case Clayton is put to work on. Edens, having devoted years of his life to defending the massive U-North Corporation in a questionable class action suit, has apparently lost his marbles. But Clayton, at first only interested in bringing his old friend back under control, begins to wonder whether there might not be some truth to his ramblings.
Gilroy’s story unfolds slowly. In places, too, it’s needlessly confusing - there’s no real justification for the flashback structure, for example, though it is well done. Told linearly, it would be a fairly straightforward and quite slim tale - what complicates it is the manner of its telling and the way we’re drip-fed information. In this sense, Michael Clayton cheats slightly, and stripped to its bare bones could be seen as nothing more than a smarter version of Wall Street’s modern morality tale.
Yet for all that, Michael Clayton is a very good film. The main reasons for that are its evocation of a fully-fleshed and real-seeming world, its subdued portrait of a moral landscape painted entirely in shades of grey, and its representation of believable and utterly flawed characters caught in circumstances where doing the right thing seems impossible. Stricter editing could have scrubbed away the elements that make it occasionally feel like a vanity project, but if you feel like spending a night in the cinema not being patronised for a change then Michael Clayton is a sure bet.
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