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A brass-knuckled commentary on corporate mores, Michael Clayton gets George Clooney to explore a new side. Gone are the winks and pranks that have become a crowd-tickling crutch. In the title role, he's a hangdog fixer at an esteemed Manhattan law firm, where the partners look down on the Fordham Law grad and yet rely on him to quell chaos with finesse. "I'm not a miracle worker, I'm a janitor," Clayton declares to one demanding client in desperate need of his dirty work. After all, he has a seat at the table in a secret Chinatown card game, a knack for slipping past police tape and a method for keeping private things private—in this case, a litigator at the firm (Tom Wilkinson) who is off his meds and ready to rat out the very agribusiness he is paid to protect.
As with Erin Brockovich, this is a Steven Soderbergh–produced melodrama that depends on a solitary, system-beating hero—in both films, the title says it all. But if Julia Roberts made her role an Oscar winner by sexing up her Everywoman, Clooney deserves praise for turning remarkably sexless. Clayton's divorced-dad existence seems devoid of the usual Clooney unflappability; in fact, his most memorable scenes are small-scale yet transformative. Clayton forsakes his enabler role in his extended family, telling his wayward brother that he's had enough of his guff; later, he bonds with his only-on-weekends little boy, telling him that, even at 10 years old, the kid is tough enough to avoid his Irish clan's bad behavior.
In other words, Clooney's white-collar wise guy actually acquires and imparts a little wisdom. The Sopranos revealed the inner lives of outward brutes and proved that the code of omertà ultimately produces more corpses than cash flow. Michael Clayton takes the thought further, depicting the lawyers as thugs in wing tips. Here, the baddies are nuanced and electrifying: There's the granddad of the firm (Sidney Pollack), who is really just an avuncular con man in weekend cashmere, and the whatever-it-takes counsel (Tilda Swinton), who is all pearls and sweat stains in her moments of untruth.
Like Clooney, Clayton proves to be a complicated champion whom audiences will cheer on. In his directorial debut, screenwriter Tony Gilroy (the Bourne trilogy) has assembled a narrative with some chilly scenes that show off his eye for noir. (Imagine an especially crafty episode of The Practice fashioned in Michael Mann's glass-and-steel jungles.) Burdened by the truth, Clayton finds that his so-called protectors will never make him a profit-sharer, and that only through his own initiative can he anoint himself a made man—the honorable kind.
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