Clooney has chops

Rating: 8/10 (11 September 2008)

George Clooney has to be, if not the most talented guy in Hollywood, certainly the luckiest. A former Sexiest Man Alive, according to People magazine, scion of a wealthy show business clan, a TV star, a movie star, and now a successful director. His first film, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, on wacky TV game show host Chuck Barris's fantasies, was a sober look at a mentally disturbed man, much better than highly lauded screenwriter and director Paul Schrader's similar Auto Focus, on TV star Bob Crane's descent into pornography. But, we've all seen this before- a big star thinks he can make films, makes a first film that is lauded- think Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and on and on, and then starts pumping out sheer dreck.
Well, scratch that with Clooney, who also wrote the film with his producer Grant Heslov. His latest film, Good Night, And Good Luck, which tracked CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's 1953-1954 battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he belittles backhandedly as 'the Junior Senator from Wisconsin', and his own network, deserved all the accolades it got in its Academy Award nomination. Of course, its nomination was for its political stance, and the relevance to the civil and human rights abuses going on today, in the failed War On Terror, but just because it got recognized for the wrong reasons does not mean it's not a worthy film.
What separates Clooney, in his first two films, from the above named actors, is that he is simply not content to tell a straightforward story. In both films he uses different filmic techniques, frames scenes in different ways- in this film letting the camera be a static fly on the wall, and generally shows that he knows what to do behind a camera, as well as in front of one. Several things show why this works. First off, Clooney and his cinematographer Robert Elswit (Magnolia) shoot the film in black and white, which always lends an 'old', historic feel to a film. Secondly, he makes the audacious choice to use footage of the real Senator McCarthy and his victims, rather than using actors. In doing so, we see how truly deranged and maniacal McCarthy was. Latter day apologists try to insist he wasn't as bad as all that, and that there were real communists in the government.
This is all true, but they were never a threat, merely a convenient scapegoat, and McCarthy's many false accusations and smears allowed the handful of real threats to later get off by claiming McCarthyist tactics were used against them. McCarthy falsified records, lied, claimed he had proof he never revealed, harassed people, never produced their accusers, practiced cowardice in the name of patriotism, and tried to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (ala Guantanamo Bay). The Left, especially in Academia, has much to answer for in its support of Stalin and Mao, and their regimes which murdered manifold more people than the Nazis, but the average laborer/fellow traveler merely saw The Party as a refuge from the vile practices of Big Capitalism at its worst. To equate a few rabble rousers with a plot to enslave the nation is to blur all colors between black and white, and like trying to make the case that David Duke was as great a threat to world peace as Hitler. This was why a Communist sympathizer like Alger Hiss was found guilty and sent to jail on a technical perjury, barely related to the treasonous crimes Richard Nixon accused him of, and which history has exculpated him for, yet is viewed as if he passed on atomic secrets like Julius Rosenberg. And it was in this gross conflation and addle-minded simplification that we see that the true threat to freedom was in the lying, manipulating, and fulminating madness of McCarthy, amply captured on film, and nicely left undiluted by Clooney, so that 'selective editing' charges are baseless. The film just misses greatness because Clooney makes a few errors. First, he has a pointless side story about a married couple (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) at CBS that violate the company rule against married employees, then he has a subplot about a man, Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), McCarthy drives to suicide (done in Martin Ritt's Woody Allen starring film The Front, with Zero Mostel's character), and finally the film's soundtrack is a bit weak, with a jazz score that seems inapt to the gravity of the situation. But, these are all minor demerits. The use of classic 1950s commercials and footage more than makes up for those weaknesses, and really gives a claustrophobic feel, at times, that only heightens the drama, the outcome of which, is known. Yet, this fact does not lessen the intensity because Clooney gives a great performance, and Strathairn, as Murrow, is simply brilliant. It is a testament to his brilliance (mostly unseen in small, independent films, such as those by John Sayles) that this great performance is almost routine in his canon.