Michael Clayton

Screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s debut as director is a highly successful attempt to re-capture the look and feel of the wide-screen, not-so-paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 70s. In a year when Sidney Lumet proved he’s still got it, Gilroy revisits Lumet’s heyday, along with others such as Alan Pakula and Sydney Pollack (who actually acts -- and very well -- in this film.) But first off, I have to confess a serious mancrush on George Clooney, who not only has the magic charm of the true movie star, but like Redford and Beatty before him, and Cary Grant before them, uses it to wise effect, to get good films made and to make them better by his presence. Without him, there’s no film, in more ways than can be enumerated. Not that the rest of the cast and crew don’t perform admirably. Clooney is the ex-cop, Fordham-grad fixer in a white-shoe Manhattan law firm, the one who gets his shoes, and everything else, dirty. Tom Wilkinson negotiates the line between sanity and madness as the chief corporate litigator who goes bonkers during a deposition in a class action lawsuit he is defending for a company which markets cancer-causing defoliants -- has he gone crazy, or is he finally sane, crossing over to the other side? Tilda Swinton wonderfully portrays the neurotic but forceful chief counsel for the ADM-like agribusiness. There’s even an excellent child actor as Clooney’s son, who sells an intriguingly interwoven subplot related to a fantasy gaming novel. The story is complicated and convoluted, and makes pleasing demands on the audience’s powers of attention and ratiocination. The plot I’ve leave you to follow -- or not -- for yourself. (2007, dvd, n.) *8* (MC-82.)