I really enjoyed this movie.
Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is world weary and slick. He fixes every lousy situation that comes up at his firm, but can’t muster the strength of will to fix his own broke down life. Interestingly, his home life is in about the same shape as his firm, but this is only revealed slowly over the course of the picture, by revealing how bad off the firm actually is (the poor state of Clayton’s home life is established early on). By the time you understand how bad off things are at the firm, Clayton has already begun to see the light with his family. But this change in Clayton isn’t obvious until the final scene: the last scene felt like a toss-up, whether Clayton was looking for a pay off, or following the redemption trajectory. For me, the ambiguousness at the end was the highlight of the entire picture.
Present Tense 