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Michael Clayton

Directed and written by Tony Gilroy

Starring George Clooney and Tom Wilkinson

Classification: 14A

Rating: ***

After writing the first two Bourne movies and co-writing the third, Tony Gilroy seems to have earned himself a free hand when it came to his directing debut, Michael Clayton. He has used it to create a seventies-style conspiracy story that is provocatively timely.

Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.

George Clooney plays the title character, a 45-year-old lawyer in a large New York corporate law firm, a self-described "janitor" who cleans up messes for clients and the firm's partners. His mediocre educational background (he's a cop's son) and gambling addiction ensures that he will never make partner, but he serves to keep high-profile clients out of jams. He also babysits the firm's top earner, the mentally unstable Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson).

One morning, as Clayton is returning from a late-night job giving damage-control advice to a rich hit-and-run driver, he stops by the roadside to admire some horses in a field. That's when his Mercedes, parked by the roadside, blows up.

Cut to four days previously. Clayton is sent on a different mission to Omaha to rein in Arthur Edens, who has had a mental breakdown. On the eve of making a lowball settlement on a big class action by a group of farmers, the star lawyer has stopped taking his medication and had a mental breakdown, stripping off his clothes and talking in apocalyptic rants.

Clayton has to bail him out of jail and sedate him, then try to mend bridges with the corporation's outraged counsel, Karen (Tilda Swinton). She puts on an aggressive front (though the first time we see her she is nervously rehearsing answers for a television interview in her hotel room with sweat stains spreading under her arms).

All three performances are terrific. Wilkinson's Edens is a semi-comic mad prophet (shades of another seventies film, Network). Swinton brings volumes of subtext to a woman with a bulldog grip on her career ladder rung and Clooney, who always impresses more when he's dramatic and defeated than when he's comically smug, nails the part of the faded charmer. All of them are caught up in a downward spiral of greasy, queasy compromises, which is the real subject of Michael Clayton.

Modelled on Nixon-era conspiracy movies films ( The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), the movie is about systemic moral failure, from the top down. Like the seventies films it models, the movie implicates the American political leadership only by analogy. There's nothing about shady defence contracts or torture revelations here. The central conspiracy — an agricultural chemical company trying to hide the data that prove its weed killer causes cancer — feels like news from 30 years ago. At least as interesting as the indirect politics is Gilroy's evocation of the seventies through aesthetic choices that are as far from the Bourne films as you could imagine. (Moviegoers who are weary of hand-held vertigo should rejoice.) Following New York-set films of the seventies, the director and his cinematographer Robert Elswit ( Good Night, and Good Luck) tell their story through changes in image size (from widescreen to close-up) rather than busy camera movement. The look emphasizes shadows and uses a cool blue-grey palette, moving through the story at a measured pace from one set-piece scenario to the next.

Instead of making us dizzy with the visual, Gilroy risks overwhelming us with information. Clayton's character has an unwieldy amount of personal baggage to drag around with him: Along with his gambling history, he has an awkward relationship with his son from a divorce. He owes $75,000 to some unpleasant people because of the failure of a restaurant business with his alcoholic cop brother.

To compound his troubles, he loses Edens, who escapes, carrying a document that could reveal the company's culpability. Michael's boss (Sydney Pollack) is putting on pressure. The company is on the verge of a major merger and can't afford to lose their lucrative contract.

In its final stretch, Michael Clayton turns into a shadowy cat-and-mouse thriller, as Michael dodges a couple of bland, professional hit men. Like Clayton, they're also "janitors" of a kind, doing even dirtier cleanup jobs in world where everyone seems to be following bad orders.

Michael Clayton wraps up with a clever enough plot trick (you're still going to be wondering about that car bomb), but there's no triumphal final note here. The last shot is of Clooney's face, looking shaken, perhaps purged, and it's held so long through the closing credits you have to start thinking about its meaning. The phrase that comes to mind is what addiction programs call a "fierce moral inventory." To put it another way, it's about taking a hard look at what we've become.