A mellow corporate thriller with too much corporate and not enough thriller, “Michael Clayton” tries to evoke the good ol’ days of films like “Network” but falls short. It ponders across sullen cityscapes of shady lawyers and calculated murder, and climaxes with an overplayed cliché.

But that isn’t to say there’s nothing redeeming about the film. There is. It’s technically well crafted by director Tony Gilroy, smartly written and beautifully acted by an understated George Clooney and an over-the-top Tom Wilkinson (“Batman Begins”).

When we meet Michael Clayton (Clooney) in a back-alley poker game, he looks dead. He’s a “fixer” at a corporate law firm, an attorney who intercepts potentially damaging situations and spins them away from the public eye. The underhandedness of the job has clearly taken its toll.

For the last six years, Clayton’s firm has been defending UNorth — a cancer-causing agrochemical company — against a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit. It all begins to unravel when the lead litigator, Arthur Edens (Wilkinson) has a nervous breakdown in the middle of depositions. Clayton is called in to force-feed Edens his Zoloft.

The irony is that the so-called gibberish Edens spouts is actually the moral awakening of a man who can no longer live with the implications of what he does: screwing Americans out of well-deserved payouts. Try as Clayton might, Edens is off the reservation for good and the cold-as-ice counsel for UNorth, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton, “Broken Flowers”), takes matters into her own hands.
Beautifully shot by cinematographer Robert Elswit, the bleak, dead-of-winter landscapes coupled with a haunting score by James Newton Howard reflect not only Clayton’s midlife malaise, but the malaise of corporate law in America as a whole.

The problem with “Michael Clayton” — aside from the ending — is its pacing. It takes its time building character arcs and developing narrative threads (some of which never fully come to fruition) while we watch Clooney’s eyes droop a little more with each passing scene. This in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the film weren’t also trying to be a thriller at the same time.

— Contact Andrew Carlin at acarlin@emory.edu