Michael Clayton

If only Michael Clayton were as smart as it thinks it is. This is not to say it’s dumb: the plot is a fissured chronology, the first part consisting of bits of the story’s conclusion. Here, we meet characters away from their determined, professional personas in a pleasantly baffling, highly atmospheric fantasia on fate and anxiety (the view of Tilda Swinton, for instance, is of her sweating through her blouse in a confining bathroom). Once things become coherent, however, Michael Clayton sags. George Clooney, playing the titular role—a “fixer” working for one of the world’s biggest corporate law firms—is a caveat; he does exactly what he should, meaning he is as charismatic and as anti-heroic as ever (those who fancy Clooney the new Cary Grant will adore his final scene with Swinton). The rest is thin: a basic morality play on evil corporations and the jaded lawyers who abet them. As litigator Karen Crowder (she has just been promoted to the position of in-house chief counsel at U/North, a fictional company with striking semiotic ties to the real-life, mock-environmentally friendly BP), Swinton is too consistent; Tony Gilroy’s (the Bourne franchise) script and direction provide her with little more than an inwardly brittle, outwardly ball-breaking stereotype. Likewise, Tom Wilkinson is risibly flat as Arthur Edens, a crazy lawyer who has a crisis of conscience a la Peter Finch’s Howard Beale in Network. Speaking of which, the affinities between the two films are acute and entirely unflattering. Network may proselytize, but it ends in stirring calamity, whereas Michael Clayton ensures, despite its ambitions as an “adult” film, that justice, for the most part, is neatly meted out. WAIT FOR THE DVD

Michael Clayton is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).