By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Feb. 29, 2023
One of the best movies that I’ve watched recently was Michael Clayton, the 2007 drama starring George Clooney that straddles the territory of corporate thriller, legal drama and character study.
Clooney is the title character, an attorney at a prominent New York law firm who specializes in estate law but truly earns his keep as a fixer who keeps bad situations from becoming worse ones. The divorced Clayton is struggling with personal issues — his relationship with his young son and ex-wife aren’t great, and his drug-addled brother has left the attorney cleaning up and covering costs on an expensive restaurant venture that went belly up long before it started to pay for itself. Moreover, Clayton’s firm is rumored to be in merger talks with another legal establishment. That’s made plenty of workers anxious about their long-term job security, not least among them Clayton, whose value as an employee isn’t reflected by traditional metrics such as billable hours.
In the midst of this, one of the firm’s biggest cash cows — defending agriculture giant U-North in a long-running class-action lawsuit over an allegedly deadly chemical product — threatens to explode when the lead attorney, Arthur Edens (the late great Tom Wilkinson), starts acting bizarrely during a deposition.
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