Film Reviews	Power of Attorney: Michael Clayton by George Sax

George Clooney in "Michael Clayton."

An air of apprehensive expectations pervades Tony Gilroy’s morose suspense melodrama, Michael Clayton. His film fairly leaches disappointment and creeping anxiety as its characters bend their outward efforts to damage control, and their inner resources to dampening a sense of desperation.

At the center of these maneuvers is the title character (George Clooney), a kind of legal concierge of last resort at an elite Manhattan law firm, a troubleshooter to attend to the revealed foibles and fuckups of the most important clients. It’s his “niche,” as a senior partner (Sydney Pollack) tells Michael in an attempt to reassure him.

But Michael isn’t finding his niche a comfortable one. In the film’s early minutes, he’s answering another lawyer’s call to aid a suburban client who’s just committed a hit-and-run killing. The guy, frightened and belligerent, tells Michael he’s disappointing as a touted “miracle worker.” He’s not a miracle worker, he responds, he’s a “janitor.”

Michael has his own mess to worry over. He’s $75,000 in the hole after closing and liquidating a restaurant he invested in with his alcoholic, reckless brother, and he hasn’t the scratch to make it good. The liquidator is making ominous noises about this.

And this legal problem-mender is about to become painfully embroiled in an enlarging crisis at his firm. His friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), the lead defense counsel in a class-action suit against an agricultural chemical firm, has just gone manically haywire during depositions. He’s putting the case, and his partners, in serious jeopardy, more seriously than initially feared, as Michael begins to discover when he’s dispatched to bring the disaster under control.

He’s not the only one. The chemical firm’s chief counsel (Tilda Swinton), a tautly, uneasily ambitious corporate climber, is about to receive alarming intelligence about the real threat that Arthur poses. And she doesn’t intend to let it develop.

Gilroy is a veteran screenwriter (the Bourne movies) making his directorial debut, and there may be an interesting irony in the results: He seems to have been more successful in his new role than in his scripting job. Michael Clayton is skillfully assembled from some nicely polished components, but its summary impact is less interesting than the succession of parts.

It’s obvious Gilroy’s got a probably well-earned knack for scene construction and pacing. The interactions, peaceful or not, of his characters are often quietly, sometimes tensely, effective. He’s worked out the various social ambiances with some insight. (I don’t know if any “white shoe” firms really have such mess-cleaning members, but the movie makes the conceit plausible enough.)

Gilroy’s dialogue is frequently honed to a tough, bright precision, and the actors are mostly very persuasive in delivering it. And atmospherics are admirably in evidence throughout.

Yet, the movie’s structure and thrust don’t, finally, acquire the logic and gravity Gilroy has tried to achieve. The high-stakes finale seems at least a little overblown and deflationary. The conspiratorial crimes are too easily confronted, after all that transpires. In one or two instances, Gilroy has resorted to immaterial distractions (his use of a plot thread about a fantasy novel that fascinates Michael’s young son, for example).

Gilroy obviously wanted to make a moral, as well as a legal, thriller. But his film doesn’t really engage enough at either level, despite the preliminary hopes it raises.

There’s also an underlying problem with such paranoia-trading suspensers. The real irony is that capitalists don’t have to resort to crude criminal enterprise to hide, or defend, their morally illicit programs. Corporate law commonly entails concealment and damage containment. A specialist like Michael is something of a small-timer. And extreme measures aren’t required.