Michael Clayton - 17 Years Too Late

 

Michael Clayton was one of those “I can’t believe you haven’t seen it” movies for me, so, 17 years late, I finally watched it. It was … fine, but I think my lack of enthusiasm for it was due to two things. First, the movie advertises Clayton (played by George Clooney) as a “fixer” who has to get a partner at his law firm under control after the man suffers a mental breakdown during a high stakes, multi-billion dollar class action case involving a cancer-causing pesticide. To me, “fixer” has a very specific connotation – a person who comes into a messy situation and cleans it up discreetly, with no fingerprints so to speak, and does not linger over the morality of what they are doing. The perfect example is Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf.

Here however, it is hard to call Clooney a “fixer.” Early in the movie, he is called out to a mansion in Westchester County because one of the firm’s clients was involved in a hit and run and fled the scene. Now, a true fixer would have a 24-hour tow service on speed dial, removed the offending vehicle from the residence and turned into a metal cube while the fixer constructed a believable alibi for the offender while also checking to make sure no traffic cameras might have caught him in the act. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Clooney basically tells the guy he (Clooney) can’t help him other than to tell him to get a good criminal defense lawyer. Uh, duh.

But Clooney’s primary mission is flying to Milwaukee to babysit the rogue law firm partner and he fails miserably at that too. The attorney, Arthur Edens (played by Tom Wilkinson) gives Clooney the slip in his hotel room and flies back to New York City. Clooney does eventually find him, but it does no good because the evil corporation’s general counsel, Karen Crowder (played beautifully by god-tier actress Tilda Swinton) has hired *actual* fixers who track Edens, put him under surveillance, and ultimately murder him, making it look like a suicide.

(There is also a whole sub plot going on showing Clooney to be a degenerate gambler who is also in hock because a restaurant he opened with his drug addicted brother went under and he doesn’t have enough money to pay off his creditors. He’s also divorced with a son, which is another sub plot that does not really go anywhere.)

In the end, Clooney does one fixer-like thing – he gets his other brother (a cop) to give him a police seal so he can break into Edens’s apartment after his death, search it, and then replace the broken seal so no one knows he was there. Of course, the evil fixers still have the apartment under surveillance and call the cops, who arrest Clooney and put his brother’s job in jeopardy; but Clooney does find a receipt in a book Edens bought at Clooney’s son’s recommendation showing he had 3,000 copies of an internal, evil corporation memo acknowledging the pesticide was dangerous (I should note the receipt said it was a COD job and Clooney’s financial problems beg the question of how he paid for them.) Obviously, the memo is extremely damaging to their case, but instead of burying it (which an actual fixer would do) Clooney leverages it to get Crowder to pay him off for his silence only instead of doing that, what he was actually doing was getting her on tape offering him a bribe. Clooney’s brother and other cops swoop in, arrest her, and the memo is presumably used by the plaintiffs to extract a massive settlement.

Which brings me to my other problem with the movie, and perhaps it is one borne of the fact I’m a lawyer – the legal stuff made NO sense. For one, Edens’s multiple contacts with the lead plaintiff would have been a clear violation of rules of professional conduct. So too would have been his decision to leak the internal memo. There was some vague mention of potential legal malpractice, but that had to do with Edens’s meltdown during a deposition, not his other, flagrant violations of the rules of professional conduct. Possession of the internal memo and its use by the client’s own law firm against it would have been another problem in the real world, but was required as a narrative device for the story.

The whole thing would have made more sense if Clooney was not marketed as a “fixer” or instead, actually was a fixer who did evil stuff on behalf of the evil corporation. I think the movie could have also worked better with an ambitious younger lawyer who becomes disillusioned when they find out the evil corporation is in fact evil, and turns into a whistle blower. To me, this is a two, maybe two-and-a-half star movie.