Not to sure what to think of Michael Clayton before seeing it. I guess I thought he was some real guy, like McCarthy or Charlie Wilson, but I didn’t expect it to be a pseudo-legal thriller. Maybe I thought it was a historical biopic. Anyway, I watched it over a few evenings this week, and I actually did enjoy it. A friend really didn’t enjoy it and couldn’t stay awake, but I found the triumvirate of Swinton, Clooney, and Wilkinson well performed. To begin, I am still trying to wrap my mind around the frame of Clayton (Clooney) standing on the hillside with the three horses as if he’s the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse (the dark one even), and I enjoyed that he was this "ghost" that no one really knew. Albeit I found the narrative characters of his brother and sister’s husband as almost banal, needed plot carriers (the cop who helps him and the drunkard who saves him). Clooney was fine in the film, but I found his substory of owning the restaurant and owing the money almost detracting from the main story, and I wish I understood more about his son’s book in terms of Wilkinson’s character of Arthur. Moreover, the relationship Clooney had with his soon wasn’t fleshed out whatsoever, although I think I still liked the film.

SPOILER Coming….. Perhaps the two shining stars in an otherwise average film were Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton. Swinton’s lawyer begins the narrative obviously distraught about some thing (which it seems turns out to be ordering Wilkinson’s death), and concludes the narrative in a fetal ball of failure and despair, while Wilkinson’s overly neurotic, off medicated maniac was played well. These two characters kept Clooney’s Clayton in check, a Clooney whose pretty boy visage has begun to droop around the jowls. Over all, it was an amusing ride that I enjoyed a little less and less as I write this review. And what was with the guy upstate who’d hit someone with his car? Huh?