"I’m not a miracle worker. I’m a janitor,” Manhattan lawyer and in-house “fixer” Michael Clayton (George Clooney) tells a frantic upper-crust client involved in a late night hit-and-run early in Tony Gilroy’s loathsome Michael Clayton. It is a transparently self-conscious assessment: Despite his entrepreneurial grooming and attire, Clayton fancies himself a disenfranchised, blue collar mug. His droopy and dour countenance, punctuated by a perpetually world-weary stare, all but cries out, “I’m no angel!” He’s a rusty cog in the capitalist machine, a ghost of a man in desperate need of redemption, or a Hollywood writer/director’s version of such (in this case, the pious, heavy hand of Bourne series scribe Gilroy will do).

Cue the first-act appearance of three prophetic horses, who apparently beckon Clayton to an upstate New York mount to receive their allusive, equine wisdom. Loosely translated, what the horses need to tell him is, “Dude, there’s a bomb in your car.” And so there is: BOOM! goes Clayton’s Mercedes-Benz S-Class. The explosion occasions an angelic fade-to-white and a flashback entitled “Four Days Earlier,” when Clayton’s mitigating knowledge of agro-chemical company U/North’s shady billion dollar lawsuit was but a speck on the horizon, and that blustery ham Tom Wilkinson (as Clayton’s bipolar confidant Arthur) had yet to show up and compare himself to Shiva.

Such is the entirely unconvincing timbre of spiritual discourse in which Michael Clayton engages. But what fascinates most is Gilroy and company’s seemingly whole-hearted belief in the bill of goods they’re selling: a dull, anti-capitalist screed made by fervent capitalists. It’s also a solemn gob of New Age hooey, as those hilltop steeds and Realm and Conquest (the in-film fantasy novel read by Clayton’s son and passed around between characters like divinely begotten writ) all-too-conspicuously show.

The presence of Sydney Pollack and Steven Soderbergh as producers (and Pollack as performer) goes a way toward explaining the film’s ultimately misguided Cinema-of-the-'70s fetishism, what with its grave, grainy imagery (courtesy of cinematographer Robert Elswit), strikingly subdued flourishes (an assassination carried out in a single, nonchalant take), and focus (via Clayton) on a moral crisis more implicit than overt. Yet Gilroy, a first-time director, mimics the skins of his mentors without ever attaining their soul.

What remains are the all-too-infrequent pleasures of performance: a sweat-drenched Tilda Swinton as U-North's villainous general counsel, licking her lips like a ravenous cat; Wilkinson’s intense reading of the film’s verbose opening monologue, which finds a place of shame (or honor?) beside his equally guffaw-inducing line from Girl With a Pearl Earring (“You’ve glazed my wife in dried piss!”); a lovelorn defendant’s (Merritt Wever) tearful confession to Clayton in an airport motel, her dialogue punctuated by the roar of planes flying overhead.

But Michael Clayton rests, as it must, on Clooney’s shoulders, and as revealed by the film’s conceptually intriguing final close-up, he is decidedly not up to the task. Clayton is supposed to be a hollow man redeemed, but in Clooney’s inexpert (perhaps merely disengaged) hands he remains a cipher, a non-entity finally canceled out by Gilroy and company’s muddled motivations. All too appropriately for this self-described “janitor”, Michael Clayton leaves nary a stain on the heart or the mind.