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PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 10/4/07)

There are worse ways for a proven screenwriter to kick off his directorial career than by crafting an exemplary vehicle for George Clooney. Tony Gilroy, the scenarist of films ranging from The Cutting Edge (yes, the ice-skating movie) to The Devil's Advocate to all three of the Bourne pictures, looks to have crafted this film's title character as a vessel for all the things that Clooney can deliver with his patented mix of panache and conviction, from swinging-cool corruption to lip-biting despair to steely moral indignation. And Clooney rises to the occasion Gilroy hands him, giving his best purely Clooney-esque lead performance since 1999's Out of Sight. (Yes, he was equally great in O Brother, Where Art Thou, but I've always thought of that as a faux-Clark-Gable-esque lead performance.)

Gilroy opens the picture with a scene of most of its major players in crisis mode. Law firm honcho Marty Bach (Pollack) has got all his people pulling an all-nighter. Corporate counsel Karen Crowder (Swinton) is sweating things out in the ladies' room. And Clooney's Clayton's done a little backsliding, or so we can infer (we meet all these characters in medias res, and don't really learn what's happening until the picture flashes back). Clayton's losing money at an underground poker game, sitting still for the wise-ass jibes of a fellow player (well portrayed by screenwriter Brian Koppelman, who's been around a card table or two) who's onto the fact that if things were going well for Clayton, he wouldn't be throwing his money away in this dive: "So you hadda be a rock star…"

The flashback explains how Clooney got there. Clayton's a law-firm fixer who's jonesing to get out, but his latest escape plan — involving a career change to tavern-keeper — has gone belly-up. He's got a failed marriage and a dysfunctional sibling on his hands. One bright spot in his life is, natch, his young son. Clayton's life begins imploding for real as one of his colleague's does, big time. Tom Wilkinson's character, the firm's lead lawyer defending an Evil Corporation in a toxic-chemical lawsuit, has a multiple-freakout-inducing "moment of clarity," which leads to his a) stripping naked in the middle of a deposition, b) declaring his love for a young plaintiff in the case, and c) gathering evidence that will definitively nail the Evil Corporation he's supposed to be defending. Clooney's dispatched to rein this guy in. Meanwhile, Crowder, the insecure, fear-driven chief counsel for the Evil Corporation, concocts her own desperate measures for dealing with the mess.

As the above might have led you to infer, Michal Clayton shares a number of affinities with Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's Network. Wilkinson's got the so-mad-he's-sane Peter Finch position; while Swinton embodies a sexless, neurotic, overstressed variant of Faye Dunaway's character. Which leaves Clooney as the (considerably younger) William Holden of the piece. And, yes, he makes the most of it. So much so that you let such inconvenient questions as "If he's the law firm's fixer, and hence knows the location of all the bodies it's buried, how come he has to go begging to his boss?" just roll past the windscreen of your consciousness and enjoy the performing bravura, which is captured with cool gloss by Gilroy and cinematographer Robert Elswit.

— Glenn Kenny