"You are so fucked," George Clooney, in the title role of screenwriter Tony Gilroy's directorial debut, informs a nemesis near the end of the picture. I'm not quite cynical enough to believe that Gilroy began with that line and worked backward from there, but I can't help but think he envisioned it as the pure Clooney moment it is. This tale of a law-firm fixer who gets in way over his head as he tries to contain a civil-suit meltdown triggered by its lead lawyer's multiple-freakout inducing "moment of clarity" shares a number of affinities with Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's Network, with Tom Wilkinson taking the so-mad-he's-sane Peter Finch position and Tilda Swinton embodying a sexless, overstressed variant of the Faye Dunaway role. Which leaves Clooney as the (considerably younger) William Holden of the piece. Does he deliver? Yeah—enough to make you forgive plot holes and emotional string-pulling that could have sunk a film that didn't have him in it.
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