Good Night, and Good Luck

(I love critical analysis, and I really enjoy doing little mini-reviews on Facebook. But those are unstructured, stream-of-consciousness pieces done just to get my mind engaged and thinking about whatever I watched/read/played. So here I'm going to try to convert those pieces into full-fledged reviews, as well as discussing some of my thoughts on reviewing, from the stand point of someone who knows very little about the theory of it -- perhaps useful, most likely not, but I'll do it anyway. This first one is from almost a month ago, Facebook told me -- still long after the film itself originally came out.)

Good Night, and Good Luck is a black-and-white historical piece that is nonetheless extremely topical, the parallels between its subject of McCarthy's Red Scare redux and the current political climate in the United States are difficult to miss (and aren't intended to be; George Clooney, the director and a supporting actor, is of course well known for being one of those Hollywood types who sticks his face in the political realm it doesn't belong.) It is well-directed by Clooney, features excellent performances from its cast, deals with a historical subject in that perfect gray zone between too-well-known and too-obscure, and falls flat. For me, at least.

This is a film that has been critically lauded and was nominated for Academy Awards. But for me it doesn't work, and the simple answer is because it lacks tension. The threat presented by McCarthy is oft-mentioned -- everyone is suitably scared when reporter Murrow decides to go after the infamous senator -- but we are never shown any evidence of this threat. I think this is an interesting point, for, after all, McCarthy is well known, and it's not as if a movie about the Nazis needs to show a Holocaust camp to make us understand the danger they represent. Perhaps it is symptomatic of my age or unfamiliarity with the subject, but I simply wasn't concerned by McCarthy, even as a subplot regarding one reporter's public condemnation by the right-wing leads to his suicide.

The central plot of the film, Murrow's public battle with McCarthy, never seems to take any weight also because we never see any work go into it. Murrow tells his subordinates to research, but we never see them do any work; the next we hear of it is Murrow giving his report on air. I'm not sure what I was expecting -- the formulaic answer would be a montage, a device forever scarred for me (for better or for worse) by Team America's song -- and the film does give us what would seem more important, Murrow's meeting with the network executive who may want to pull the plug on the McCarthy report to protect the network. (This is another scene that fails to interest, though, even if it's historically accurate: after a brief confrontation the executive reveals that he is backing Murrow. Everyone in the film, besides McCarthy, supports Murrow, and while the idea of avoiding casting McCarthy and simply using original footage of the man is brilliant, the lack of any real opponent to Murrow may be what causes the lack of tension.)

The subplots are another item of concern. The aforementioned reporter who commits suicide is one, and well-done, I think, but I was too busy trying to figure out if it was indeed President Dugan from Red Alert 2 that I didn't pay much attention to him in his scenes (and couldn't take him seriously when I did -- because it was the same actor, Ray Wise.) This is my failing, of course, and my issues with the second subplot, concerning a married couple who work in Murrow's office and conceal their marriage due to network regulations, may also be my fault. This again may be my age, but I found the entire thing absurd -- its only saving grace being that towards the end of the film the staff makes clear that they knew the whole time the couple was married and simply played along. It is a true story, as is the reporter's suicide and most of the film, but it doesn't seem to work in the context of the movie.

I seem to be ripping Good Night, and Good Luck apart, but it really is a good movie. David Strathairn as Murrow takes a role with so much speechifying that it must have been tremendously difficult to avoid being cheesy and creates a believably strong character by keeping him reserved and collected (which also makes a nice contrast to McCarthy's fanatical blathering). The rest of the cast are all capable and competent -- my issues with their characters stemmed more from the plot than any aspect of their acting -- and, again, Clooney's directing is applaudable. At first glance this should be a brilliant film -- so maybe it's just me, or my age, or one of the million possible things in the great gulf between the artist creating and the audience experiencing that can make things go wrong due to no fault of either. But for me, it doesn't quite fly.