Eye Candy #153 - "Michael Clayton"

Michael Clayton: A legal thriller with an odd sense of detachment. Clooney is Michael Clayton, a "fixer" for a prominent law firm, who is called in because one of the law firm's partners (Tom Wilkinson) has a nervous breakdown and a crisis of conscience involving long-standing litigation against a company whose fertilizer product killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 people (in which the partner is a lead defense attorney). More a diatribe about circumspect bedfellows and the lengths we then are forced to go to protect said bedfellows, even when they place us in a situation that is untenable, then a Grisham-esque "thriller" (as some of his stories are anything but). Slow-going, at 2 hours (thus violating my thrillers should be longer than 105 minutes rule), it has a curious outside-looking-in feeling to it, like we are voyeurs rather than your standard audience, witnessing the inner workings of a world most of us are quite removed from. The film plays out of order, starting near the end and then flashing back 4 days to show how everything fell apart in that short timeframe. Clooney, playing slightly against type (he's not his usual glib self_ and Wilkinson are both excellent. Swinton has a weird role in that you don't really understand why the hell she's there until 3/4 of the way through the movie. Sydney Pollack has a small role as one of the partners and he's great in whatever he touches. Definitely worth seeing. Oscar-worthy for Wilkinson, don't know if it's Oscar-worthy for Clooney.