We're in New York City, and Michael Clayton, a legal fixer for a powerful law firm, is leaving a poker game to handle a fatal hit-and-run by one of the firm's big clients. This client's problem soon turns out to be the least of Clayton's troubles, which include gambling debts and the bankruptcy of a restaurant owned with Michael's brother Tim.
Minor troubles include a flickering GPS display on the dash of Clayton's Mercedes. When you first watch this scene this may not register, but it will, later on, when the scene is framed in a different context.
After a frought meeting with the hit-and-run client, Clayton stops when he sees 3 horses in the dim light on a distant hill. It reminds him of a storybook illustration his young son Henry has shown him...
Clayton approaches the horses slowly and is careful not to startle them. Intriguingly, there are not any fences or barriers in evidence during this scene. If you are the kind of filmgoer whose enjoyment of mystery and suspense is undone by plot revelations, it might be a good idea to stop reading now.
This is because Clayton's car blows up during his contemplation of these horses.
At this point writer and director Tony Gilroy takes us back to four days earlier, when star attorney Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) has gone off his medication for manic depression and stripped naked during a court hearing of a suit against the firm's client, a pesticide maker named U / North. Arthur has become convinced that U / North is guilty of concealing the danger posed by their product, which has been implicated in hundreds of deaths. We find out that he has also marked passages in the same storybook Henry mentioned, a fable about fighting for truth and justice called "Realm & Conquest".
We're also introduced to U / North's chief counsel, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton in an Oscar-winning performance), who berates Clayton for Arthur's odd behavior, while concealing the fact that she has picked up the chief attorney's abandoned briefcase. Surveying its contents has led her to make some arrangements...
Those arrangements later turn out to be having a pair of assassins kill Arthur with a drug overdose. When it becomes apparent that Clayton, aided by his policeman brother Gene, has searched Arthur's apartment and found the key to a memo implicating U / North hidden in a copy of "Realm & Conquest", Karen makes some more arrangements. Gilroy shows us the scene of Clayton leaving the card game again, but this time leads up to this sequence with the killers placing a bomb in the Mercedes. Then they take after him in their Buick. Much of the story takes place in dark streets and dim light, a metaphor for the dark heart of the tale.
The bomb placement explains why the GPS screen in the Mercedes works intermittently. Clayton pounds on the dash to revive it, and the two killers lose their signal at several points on the drive...
We see the scene with the horses again, but this time we see Clayton throw his watch, wallet and phone into the flaming car. At this moment, when he has decided to abandon the amoral corporate system, he is, in a way, as free as those unfenced horses...
He retrieves copies of the implicating memo and confronts Karen in the lobby outside U / North's board meeting. The dialog is sharply written and unforgettable."I'm not the guy you kill. I'm the guy you buy." He demands 10 million dollars to hide the evidence. When Karen says this meeting will need more time, and should take place somewhere else, Clayton asks, "Where? My car?"
After Karen agrees that U / North will deposit the ten million in Clayton's bank account, he reveals he's been wearing a wire all along, and takes a confirming photo. The CEO emerges from the meeting and demands to know who Clayton is. He answers, "I'm Shiva, the god of death."
Then a team of police enter the hall and walk right past Clayton when the CEO demands they arrest him. Instead, they take the CEO and Karen, who has collapsed onto the floor, into custody. Clayton's policeman brother Gene (Sean Cullen) asks if he's OK and then tells him to stay close...
In the final scene, Clayton boards a yellow cab (remember those?) and when the driver asks him where he's going, he just hands the driver some cash and says, "Give me fifty dollars worth." You guess that in New York City traffic, a fifty-dollar ride could fall under the category of "staying close."
Photo Credits: All images are from "Michael Clayton", released in 2007, with rights held by Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and affiliated production companies.
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