Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a “fixer” for a powerful law firm. It’s his job to clean up when one of the powerful clients of the firm or one of its own gets into trouble. He describes himself as a janitor, but he is highly valued by the firm, but not enough to be given equity or to be financially rewarded as well as its high-flying partners. Sydney Pollack, playing one of the senior partners tells him how lucky he is to have “found a niche”. This is a good movie and Clooney is terrific. The closing titles where he gets in a taxi, tells the driver to “give me fifty dollars worth, just drive” and then sits with his emotions and thoughts playing out on his face is masterful and like nothing I have seen before. It’s a shame sometimes that the media is so efficient at making us aware of an actor’s political views as the one quibble I have with this film is that it seems to suffer from a little left wing bias in that it seems to imply that large corporations routinely employ hit men and law firms have no mortal qualms whatsoever about the cases they take on. I’m even prepared to except the latter, but the former point is a bit of a stretch.