Seeking His Moral GPS--Michael Clayton (2007)

      In the first few minutes of "Michael Clayton," we learn a lot about the title character (George Clooney)--none of it good. He plays cards for high stakes, but not well. He's tried to open his own restaurant and bar, and failed. He's an attorney with a high-powered law firm, but has the kind of position that requires him to show up at a wealthy client's home in the middle of the night and make a hit-and-run accident disappear. Obviously fed up with such duty, Michael informs the frustrated client that he's not the "miracle worker" the firm promised to send. "I'm a janitor," he explains, a cleaner-up of messes. Clearly, somewhere along the line, Michael Clayton has lost his way.
      And just in case the viewer hasn't realized that yet, writer and first-time director Tony Gilroy decides to illustrate the point; as Michael drives through the dark, his dashboard GPS navigation system flickers and fails. Oh look, Michael's lost his way. I sighed to myself at that point. "Well, fooey," I thought, "this guy Gilroy's going to have a pretty heavy hand." Happily I was wrong; Gilroy's hand with the thriller genre proves light and deft. It turns out that there's a very good reason for the loss of Michael's electronic map and compass, or rather, a very bad one. But that comes much later.
      First there must be a crisis, and that's provided by Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), Michael's friend and the firm's heavy hitter. Arthur has spent the last several years spearheading the defense of U/North, a powerful agri-chemical company facing a class action suit, but their obvious guilt has driven him to a crisis of conscience and a nervous breakdown--he strips naked at a deposition and proclaims his love for one of the litigants. Michael and U/North's chief counsel Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) are called in to clean up the mess.
      With hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, nothing good can believably happen to Arthur at this point, and nothing does. What makes this thriller work is not so much the plot--though that is believable and artfully framed--but the skill with which Gilroy and the principals trace the intersecting velocities of each character's personal moral journey.
      On one axis lies Arthur. As we hear in a rambling but passionate voiceover, Arthur views himself as a man reborn, and Wilkinson's performance skillfully balances the giddy zeal of the newly converted with the savvy of a battle-hardened trial attorney. On the other axis lies Karen, portrayed by Swinton with a deer-in-the-headlights, jittery brittleness. Promoted to the very limits of her capabilities, she lives in terror of failure. She compulsively rehearses all her professional presentations and still gives in to sweat-soaked anxiety attacks in her office's restroom. Crippled by her fear, she falls back on a misplaced sense of loyalty, committing herself to a downward spiral of ever-worsening moral compromises.
      And finally, in the space between, there's Michael. Unable to join Arthur in his leap of faith, but unwilling to throw him beneath the bus for the sake of the firm, Michael chooses a middle path. The ending, though not disastrous, feels forced--tacked on to satisfy an audience that needs to see evil punished and good rewarded. Michael Clayton does its best work not at the poles of black and white but in the middle, in the gray, where Michael and most of the rest of us are forced to find our way.