Not to sound obtuse, but I'm pretty sure there was a reason behind naming the film Michael Clayton after its primary character. It's a character study deluxe, a thoughtful, moralistic achievement that is at once confusing as heck plot-wise and rich in every other way.

George Clooney plays Michael Clayton, who is a self-proclaimed bag man, a fixer of bad situations. He's also a gambling addict, deep in the hole relative to a bar he tried to open. I'm not too sure.

However, Michael Clayton is a moral man, and the death of his colleague (Tom Wilkinson), who suffers a mental breakdown associated with manic depression and is eventually murdered, sets him off along a path of righteousness -- no longer able to ignore the moral wrong inflicted by his law firm, which is in cahoots with a company that produced a carcinogenic herbicide.

Without giving too much away, Wilkinson was a laywer for the firm representing U-North and at some point, fueled by his refusal to stay on his depression meds, he realizes that he's defending a scumbag company. He strips naked in the middle of a videotaped deposition.

You read that right, and Wilkinson's character followed that path all the way to hell, slain by hooligans representing U-North.

How we get from Point B to Point A to Point C (it's one of those movies that starts close to the end and then goes back to the beginning only to re-pass the original point and finish) is what's a tad confusing.

This seems to be a trend with Clooney films, particularly Syriana, which I found to be both a bore and a cluster. However, what I can say with confidence is that he's approaching greatness. Close, oh, so close. George Clooney makes any movie he's in better.

Michael Clayton is a man resigned to the sorry state of the world, resigned to the notion that he sucks as an attorney but has this gift for doing the firm's dirty work, which pays handsomely. He is a man resigned to the notion that he'll never be completely cured of his addiction.

But he's a man whose pecadilloes don't preclude him from understanding basic moral righteousness and being able to act on it when need be. And although Clayton probably spent a career doing the dirty work of a firm that represents dirty companies, perhaps we can presume that in his role as "fixer," he had never been presented with such a clear moral choice.

I enjoyed this from the perspective of it being a film that made me think about character development. If you watch it from the point of view that this movie is 100 percent about this character, I think you'll love it.

However, the marketingspeak on the cover of the DVD called this film a "gripping thriller," and that it was not. It was a solid thriller in the vain of a Grisham movie, only smarter.

In the category of big screen character studies, this was near brilliant.

Would I watch it again? If you cooked me dinner, yes. But I probably wouldn't actively, purposefully watch it again.

Would you buy the DVD? No.