Michael Clayton: A Review

In law school, it was a story told so frequently it was easy comedy. A fresh-faced One L (first-year student) would enter law school with wide-eyed dreams of fighting for justice, whether that be by keeping criminals off the streets, keeping those same criminals on the streets by fighting the inequities and injustice in the system, or by fighting for some other cause of the neglected and downtrodden.

Then came the second year. In the fall, when the interview season would open up for second-year summer internships, those same crusaders would be seen wearing their finest suits giving the firms with the long and impressive string of names a try. By the end of the third year, they were already researching the lease costs on their new car, planning their vacation and condo rental, and getting ready for their full dive into the world of the big firm.

This kind of path isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but Michael Clayton invites us to explore the compromises that come into the play in this somewhat ordinary legal journey. The directorial debut for Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter for such strong scripts as the Bourne series and The Devil’s Advocate, another excellent film about the big time law firms, Clayton is a fascinating study of compromise in its late stages. George Clooney plays the title character, a man pushing 50 who traded in a career as a prosecutor for a role as a special counsel for one of the giant firms in New York. He is the firm’s “fixer,” the guy who cleans up the messes that the extremely wealthy and powerful clients of the firm find themselves in.

One of Clayton’s “fixer” projects was Arthur Edens, played by Tom Wilkinson, who is one of the partners at his law firm. Edens is a brilliant litigator and fierce fighter, but has struggled with mental illness throughout his life. Though the illness has been controlled through medication, it fell to Clayton years ago to get him straightened out when he had fallen off the wagon and threatened his career and the firm’s viability. Now, years later, Edens has gotten himself into trouble again.

Edens has been pouring himself into a single case. His client is an international agricultural products company and is facing a multi-billion dollar class action suit for allegedly introducing some kind of chemical into the water supply that has killed or injured a number of people. In the middle of a deposition of one of the plaintiffs, Edens goes off the deep end, and strips naked and runs through the building screaming.

In trying to help Edens out, Clayton is brought into a case that quickly puts on him a crises of conscience. Already struggling with personal failures, Clayton finds his firm defending the bad guy here, and he quickly becomes aware that there is much at stake in this battle. The company’s general counsel, played by Tilda Swinton, is fierce in her desire to defend the company and, perhaps more importantly, defend her boss. In the midst of his madness, Edens has discovered the fateful memo, the single document that shows that the company knew of the chemical’s risks, and signed off on the distribution based on their own cost-benefit analysis.

The film does a fantastic job of setting the stage for our entry into this life. Clayton’s world is a ruthless and vicious world, where lives are bought and sold in the name of self-interest and survival. Clayton, struggling with his own sense of disappointment in his life, seems to come at the case with a dawning realization of the price he has paid for the life he has lived. When he tries to raise some of these questions to his boss and mentor, he is pushed aside, with a reminder that he has always known how “we pay the light bills around here.”

The film poses more questions then answers. Clayton is essentially trapped within a system for which there is no answer. Even though he knows the truth, it is not as if he can simply come forward and betray his client. To do so, he would subject himself to disbarment and his firm to a bankrupting claim of malpractice. The film opts for some stereotypical Hollywood pyrotechnics to wind its way out of this mess. That’s all well and good, but it simply drives home how difficult the questions of real life become.

As an attorney, I represented some clients I found fairly distasteful. I wasn’t always sure I like the side that I represented. I rarely like the outcomes the cases had. My own wrestling in this world, a wrestling that led me first into public service and eventually into ministry, was a desire to live a life of meaning. In my own wrestling, I would often reach the end of my cases, look at the resolution, and say, “Is this it?” Hollywood rules dictates that Michael Clayton does something to solve the problem, but the real life version of this story may realistically involve nothing more than Michael Clayton finding the strength to walk away, knowing that some problems really can’t be solved.

In one of the more interesting scenes in the film, Edens recounts how many billable hours he had put into this case. As he toys around with the numbers, he winds up proclaiming that he had spent 12% of his life on this case. Edens is driving himself insane as he realizes he has wasted that much of his life in a worthless venture. It is the sadness of wasted time, the sadness of a wasted life.

The power of the Michael Clayton is in the call to count the cost. Perhaps the work we do will not take us down as dark of corridors as we see here, but the opportunity to compromise is still a daily pressure. Michael Clayton makes the bold proposition that many of those compromises aren’t that mysterious, and that many times we walk into these traps with our eyes wide open. Whether the seduction is money, or power, or security, or ego, the temptations only expose the darkness in our souls and our willingness to trade meaningful lives for meaningless enticements.

“What does it profit a man, if he gains the world, but loses his own soul?”