by Katherine Ramsland
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| Actor George Clooney plays Michael Clayton, a cynical corporate attorney. |
White collar crime hardly presents a promising subject for fictional drama; it's barely discussed even in academic settings. That's probably because there's not a lot of action for a movie and the moral issues are often hazy. Lying, stealing and cheating in the name of greed, while always reprehensible, are not always punishable — or punished. In fact, the fuzzy aspects in this film directly mirror the difficulty of identifying these legal violations. Yet it's no surprise that the bad guys are CEOs and attorneys; we've come to expect that. Which brings us to George Clooney's depiction of "Michael Clayton," a cynical corporate attorney who moves through the shadowy realm of "truth adjusting" (which he compares to being a janitor). Clooney is at his usual top form in this flick, entering via a low-profile position and then taking charge.
Star litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), of the prestigious firm of Kenner, Bach & Ledeen, has had an apparent breakdown while settling a high-stakes class-action suit against U/North, an agrichemical corporation that allegedly hawks harmful products. Eden views himself as U/North's accomplice in moral wrongs so terrible he can no longer continue. In fact, he wishes to expose what's going on, which prompts his law firm, led by Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), to order Clayton to "clean up." At first, Clayton thinks that Edens is clearly delusional, the result of a bipolar disorder, and Edens' bizarre appearance and behavior confirm it. But then the case reveals its sinister dimensions.
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| Actor Tom Wilkinson as Star litigator Arthur Edens (left) with Clooney as Michael Clayton. |
Clayton, a former prosecutor from a family of police officers, is already burned out over the work he does for the firm, despite his handsome pay and exclusive benefits. He'd like to quit but poor personal choices have trapped him in debt, so he must continue to sponge up the messes made by the wealthy clients his firm protects. Yet Edens presents evidence that Clayton can't easily dismiss, confronting him with the larger impact of his own compromised life. He begins to recognize the cost in human suffering and to realize it's time to wake up. That puts him in position to be the tenuous axis on which this story rotates.
As Americans, we've grown used to the apparent lack of ethics in the corporate arena, as one scandal after another has surfaced: Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and even Martha Stewart. It's almost cliché now to describe a corporate CEO as unscrupulous; that's like calling a lawyer a shark. In part, the permissive atmosphere and cut-throat psychopathy are the logical outcomes of a judicial decision to grant corporations the status of personhood, but without accountability for individual directors. For many corporate critics, that decision invites — nay, encourages — plunder, deception, coercion, and other immoral acts to be justified in the name of Big Profit. Law firms, as corporate entities, are no exception. They, too, must survive as a business. Thus, we see collusions such as those in Michael Clayton on a significant scale. The only stop-gap measure within a firm arises from individuals with both a conscience and the power to call others to account.
Clooney (also a producer) has proven himself a versatile actor, from the perfectly-timed comedic characters in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty to his more pensive roles in Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. While in this film he plays a man who starts out barely likeable, he makes up for it with growth and dramatic reaction. He's got the perfect face for expressing an unsettled conscience trying to set things right.
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