Michael Clayton, now on DVD, blu-ray, download, and pay per view, is presented as a "ripped from the day’s headlines" true story of corporate greed and perfidy—but in fact it’s a fairy tale.

The George Clooney dramatic vehicle Michael Clayton is well produced, with persuasive performances, decent if uninspired cinematography, and reasonably interesting direction, but the script contains two entirely unreal elements, central to the story, that destroy the sense of reality the filmmakers try so carefully to build through the surface aspects of the film.

Both the false premises revolve around the notion that corporations go around indiscriminately killing people.

In the film the president of U-North, a fictional large U.S. firm based all too obviously on ADM and Monsanto, knew that one of the company’s products would cause cancer in farmers and their families by polluting the groundwater in rural areas—and deliberately suppressed this information and allowed the production to go on.

This is one of the great fantasies of statists: that they can catch some big company holding a "smoking gun" proving that it knowingly killed people.

It just doesn’t work that way. In fact, things go in the very opposite direction in real life. American companies are so afraid of being sued into oblivion—a very real fear with a large number of examples to justify it—that they will avoid putting out a product if there is even the slightest chance that it will harm somebody.

Thus a firm’s self-interest keeps it firmly on the side of its customers’ safety—and denies the public countless safe and useful products because many Americans’ greed and lawsuit addiction forces companies to avoid doing anything that could cause them any trouble.

Hence the central premise of Michael Clayton is absurd. Similarly unreal is the film’s notion that companies send out goons to kill people who threaten their bloated, obscene, fully unjustified profits. This is a manifestation of the Columbo Syndrome, after the fun 1970s mystery show Columbo, in which the killer was always a rich and powerful person.

The difference between Columbo and Michael Clayton is huge, however. In Columbo the  antagonist’s wealth and power is way to provide a sufficiently formidable opponent for the great detective. The antagonist is presented most assuredly as a deviation, not the norm for American business people. The show is a fun game, not presented as a realistic view of American society.

Even more importantly, Columbo concentrated its characters’ motives on what we all know ultimately motivates nearly all that we do: personal issues—getting out of debt, eliminating an annoying spouse while keeping his or her money, avoiding exposure of some other crime, etc.

Michael Clayton, by contrast, never even suggests any personal reasons for the characters to commit the vile crime at the center of the film, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, a real mass murder. The filmmakers assume that pointing out that the miscreants are business people will be enough to convince us that they’d glibly murder countless innocent strangers.

That is a thoroughly ludicrous notion, and it entirely destroys the very sense of verisimilitude and relevance that the filmmakers are clearly so intent on establishing.

The fact is, the real problem with corporations is that the government-established policy of allowing the shareholders to have only limited liability—meaning their other assets cannot be placed in danger if they hold stock in a corporation that goes bad in some way; only the money they invested in the firm is at risk—means that the people who provide the money don’t have any other stake in the firm. And that means that the people with the most at stake are the managment, employees, and customers.

That is why companies can make bad decisions time and time again—because the stockholders often don’t take as much interest as they would if they were held fully responsible for all harm the company might do. They have a lot to gain, and numerous other things to do with their time, and only their initial investment to lose.

But it is also why a company’s managers do everything they can to avoid legal trouble. They have everything to lose—their livelihood and even their freedom. Thus even when Enron was crumbling, the firm’s executives didn’t kill VP Sherron Watkins when she warned them that she knew of the company’s numerous illegal practices. Instead, they tried their luck with the courts—and went to jail.

The bosses of Enron were right up to their necks in blatantly illegal activities—but they never descended into violence. If they didn’t think to kill off or even physically threaten the person who eventually led to their arrest, trial, and incarceration, certainly it is absurd to posit that corporate boardrooms are places where car bombings and other murder plots are hatched.

The centrality of such notions to the story line of Michael Clayton is quite a pity, as the performances and other superficial elements of the film are quite good. But pretty nonsense is still nonsense.