RECOMMENDED After writing three Jason Bourne screenplays, screenwriter Tony Gilroy directs “Michael Clayton,” his first drama. His title character (George Clooney, also an executive producer) is a “fixer” at the Manhattan law firm Kenner, Bach & Ledeen. Like the corporate “kidnap and ransom” negotiator in Gilroy’s “Proof of Life,” Michael Clayton is asked to do an awful lot, although his tasks here lack the international travel and gunplay of his counterparts in Gilroy’s earlier screenplays. “I’m not a miracle worker. I’m a janitor,” he tells a client who asks for too much. (Or, as director John Ford once downplayed his calling: “I’m a traffic cop in front of the camera.”) The beauty of this corporate law thriller is Gilroy’s intelligent taste in handling the genre. Gilroy and Clooney draw on film noir tropes of the private eye, divorced and in debt, who is jerked around by an employer. He discovers awful truths about their world and redeems himself in his own. Power is embodied in two fine turns by co-stars. As Clayton’s boss, Sydney Pollack (also a producer) replays the power-pricks he did in “Changing Lanes” and “Eyes Wide Shut.” And Tilda Swinton plays the counsel of a global agro-chemical conglomerate with a class-action suit over a carcinogen. She did cutthroat in “The Beach” and corporate in “Vanilla Sky.” Tom Wilkinson is the manic-depressive litigator who goes off his meds and suffers a fatal bout of conscience. Gilroy’s touches are subtle and smart throughout, right down to the sound mix in the last shot under the credits. 120m. (Bill Stamets)
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