I remember Michael Clayton as one of those movies that is on the brink of greatness but doesn’t quite get there, for reasons I could not quite articulate. After hearing it mentioned in some Filmspotting episodes I listened to recently, I wanted to give it another go. I came away with the same feeling. It’s a movie I will recommend to others without any reservations, so why can I not bring myself to rate it above 4/5?
The performances are excellent. Clooney is giving one of his best performances. On one hand, it is hard to imagine this movie without him, because of how he makes Michael Clayton his. On the other hand, I think he is a little too good-looking, a little too charismatic for the role. The script finds him not at rock bottom, but, had the extraordinary events of the movie had not happened, on his way to slowly getting there. I always have trouble believing Clooney in these roles; I’m just too used to the version of him that can get out of anything with a smirk. I can’t help but wonder how this movie would turn out with someone like Philip Seymour Hoffman, for instance. It’s one of those roles that, depending on who you cast in it, could take the movie somewhere else entirely. Imagine Benicio del Toro as Clayton, or go in a completely different direction with David Strathairn.
The big surprise comes from Tilda Swinton as Karen, in a very uncharacteristic role for her, but one that she simply nails. She is incredible in the scene at the end as she goes from portraying a smug winner to a heap on the ground. Tom Wilkinson and Sydney Pollack are very good in their parts. Even Michael O’Keefe manages to be memorably unlikable despite the low amount of screen time he gets.
The script is solid, if a little unfocused at times when it goes deeper than needed on the environmental case, the Anna character, and sometimes even Wilkinson’s character, Arthur. Not exceedingly so for any of them, but I think they add up to some cruft.
In the end, I decided that what makes this film only 4/5 for me is that I could in fact recommend it to everyone I know without any reservations. Michael Clayton is a very risk free movie that tries maybe a little too hard to be recommendable to everyone. The cast are perfectly safe choices, including Clooney. There is a little non-linearity to how the story is told, yes, but overall the script is very straightforward and doesn’t ask too much from the audience.
My biggest gripe, however, is how all the responsibility for being evil falls on Swinton’s character. We see regret from Arthur and a desire to make things right, but no real reckoning. I think Marty is mostly shown as a good guy (a meh guy at worst) despite openly telling Clayton not to be naïve about their part in helping corporations cover things up. Barry is unlikable, but not because of his part in the grand scheme of things—only because of his personal relations. Don, Karen’s boss, could be removed from all scenes and left as an invisible force behind Karen’s fear of disappointing.