Good Look, Bad Talk, Bad Taste

Rating: 4/10 (29 April 2006)

Some movies you love because they're great (or they push your own worldview). Some you hate because they stink (or they oppose your own worldview). Most leave you cold because they're mediocre and don't say much of anything about the world. It's an odd feeling to take a strong personal dislike to a movie about which you're ideologically conflicted on ethical grounds that transcend all of these considerations.
I refer to the use made of the character played by the actor who played the nutty father of the slain girl in TWIN PEAKS who kills himself by sticking his head in a gas oven. He had been a staunch liberal TV newsman, apparently. A staunch conservative newspaper columnist said that he was probably some kind of pinko because of his left-leaning positions and that CBS should get rid of him. A nice lady starts reading a column full of such accusations and unkind suggestions out loud to the putative pinko and Murrow and a whole bunch of Murrow's boys and then stops. "No, read it all," the guy insists with tears in his eyes and his nostrils flaring as though they are motorized. So she does. And yep. The columnist more or less said that he really had to be some kind of pinko. The guy comes crying to Murrow. "Save me from that columnist who says that I'm some kind of pinko." But Murrow tells him that when he reads the paper in which that column appears it might be a good idea to skip that column, seeing as how it is so upsetting to him to be called some kind of pinko. Sounds like good advice to me. But the guy doesn't take it. R.I.P.
Has Clooney no shame? No decency at long last? The poor man has no place in this movie. Maybe there was more to it in real life. I suspect that there was even less. In any case, as portrayed here, his personal unhappiness and tragedy are not a bad reflection on McCarthy. They are not even THAT bad a reflection on the conservative columnist, who doesn't even sound particularly nasty or threatening. All he did was hurt the guy's feelings and POSSIBLY misrepresent his political position at a time when that MIGHT lead to serious trouble. He didn't cost him his job or out-and-out slander him or degrade him or reveal any dirty secrets or get him in any trouble. The poor man is just a lost soul with personal demons. Just like the dead girl's father on TWIN PEAKS. From motorized nostrils start to stove dial finish this part of the film is stupid, manipulative, and in horribly bad taste.
Hmmm. I think I DO hate this movie... Across the board. The main problem with it is that there's really no story here. That is anathema in a movie about news people. It is no more than a mildly interesting sidebar to one of American history's most distressing embarrassments. No wonder Clooney felt that he had to spice things up with an implication of murder-by-impoliteness. And a jarringly pointless subplot about a married couple working at CBS who have to pretend that they are not married because CBS has a policy against married couples working for CBS.
I've yet to read a criticism of the stilted dialog. "The waters in which you are attempting to navigate are dangerous." Then there is the sanctimonious sententiousness of that spiel by Murrow (who is depicted here as a melancholy prig and not as the choleric gadfly he seems to be in the old clips)about the supposed assault by Senator McCarthy on everyone who ever "read a dangerous book or has a different kind of friend." Think I saw that engraved in marble somewhere in DC between the Lincoln and the Jefferson Memorial.
Clooney is really indulging his late Boomer inner child here as well as his liberal politics. This is the second coming of a popular hero in the less and less visited pantheon of 50s/60s-style Liberal Enlightenment. Murrow is not in the CBS building. He is not on the boob tube. He is not in a drab suit with a skinny black tie. He is in a golden cloud, in a toga, with a swarm of putti attending. I expected Ben Kingsley to pop in wearing a saffron loincloth to join the entire cast in a rousing chorus of "It's A Small World After All." (Or should I say, "There Will Be Pie in the Sky When You Die"?) Lenin's mummy looked truer-to-life.
The acting is good. Celeste Holm got an Oscar nod for the way she says four words in COME TO THE STABLE.In the role of CBS president William Paley Frank Langella deserves an Oscar for the way he brings balance, depth, shades of gray, and reality itself to the proceedings in his four minutes of screen time. Straithern's impersonation of Murrow is pretty good when he is on air: when he is supposed to be a real coffee-slurping newsman in smoke-filled rooms, he makes you sigh for the relative life-likeliness of Clark Gable as Parnell.
The camerwork is pretty but pretentious.