Since I carved out a little digital space this past week to express my disappointment with one of the new movies being aggressively positioned as a Oscar contender, I’ll use this regular archival rummaging to share a review from ten years ago that examined a film that I felt was also overpraised. I actually find Michael Clayton to be a solid movie, but the fervent celebration it enjoyed left me a little perplexed. I’ll take director Tony Gilroy’s follow-up, Duplicity, over this one any day.

Screenwriters routinely see their work savaged after they submit their printed pages to the money machine that cranks out films, so it’s hard to begrudge a writer who, given the opportunity, perhaps adheres a bit too closely to their nicely processed words. Tony Gilroy, with plenty of produced screenplays since he made “Toepick” into a smugly satisfied put-down fifteen years ago, makes his directorial debut with Michael Clayton, and the film plays like the script probably reads. There’s a novelistic seriousness and sturdiness at play in this legal drama about a major law firm’s fixer and the crisis of conscience he faces when he’s called in to bring a mentally unhinged attorney under control. Gilroy wants the story to carry the weight, which generally works nicely, but there are passages where some directorial flourishes and inventiveness may have transformed the more familiar elements into something fresher. Even the actors sometimes seem overly beholden to the script, really punching the emotions that likely showed up in the stage directions. “Worried” and “Manic” come across clear as the studio logo at the start of the film.

It’s not just an empathy for the resounding satisfaction that must come from preserving work that’s often discarded which inspires an inclination towards forgiveness for these minor faults. There’s also the simple fact that all the pieces of the film, including these that I’ve just mildly maligned, add up to something satisfying. It’s hardly groundbreaking — the story of corporate malfeasance harming good, working people echoes from the spirited rambunctiousness of Erin Brockovich and the earnest crusading of A Civil Action to cite two recent examples — but it leavens its familiarity with its solid storytelling. It may be a marker of its era as much as anything that a film with the sheen of peak professionalism and a movie star at its center feels refreshing simply because it’s free of masses-massaging compromise. It’s very craftsmanship is the film’s greatest attribute.

George Clooney, the movie star in question, continues his trend of choosing projects that strive to say something. It may be amusing to identify this as continued penance for prior crimes against moviegoers. Truth is, as Clooney has gotten more capability to chose his projects, he’s defaulted to the sorts of 1970’s potboilers-with-a-point that he adores. His performance here may be more about presence than plumbing depths, yet he does artfully get to the title character’s weary problem-solving and desperate opportunism. He’s just as likely to get out of the way and let Tom Wilkinson verbally pinball through a scene as the conflicted lawyer off his meds, or, better yet, bob in the gentle wake of Sydney Pollack’s beautiful underplaying as a senior partner impatient with the needless distractions he’s facing. As the Dorian Gray portrait of Pollack-the-director continues degrading in the attic, the Pollack-the-actor who periodically waltzes through supporting roles grows more and more vibrant.

This is what movie-making looks like when a writer preserves the integrity of his own vision. This what movie-making looks like when everyone involved cares about the finished product with something more valuable that box office rewards in mind. Studio movie-making used to look like this far more often. It is something of an achievement, that it can briefly look like it again.