Sigh...

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2006)

When they announced the Academy Award nominations this year, I has seen all but one of the best picture nominees--Good Night and Good Luck. Of the other four, the only one that seemed deserving of its nod was Munich. Crash was far to simple-minded for my taste (please, go see Do the Right Thing if you want to see a movie that deals intelligently with race in America), and, as a huge supporter of Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, I was let down by Ang Lee's translation; Capote was a lot better than I anticipated, but it was not one of the five best pictures released in 2005. Having seen the trailers for, read the reviews about, and listened to my Hollywood friend expound on the virtues of Good Night and Good Luck, I assumed that I would be immediately drawn to the movie. I like George Clooney and adore David Strathairn; the topic was interesting; the cinematography looked fantastic.
Well, I was enormously let down. The direction was solid and the cinematography was brilliant. The acting was very good as well. However, I'd argue the movie fails on the level of its writing. Given what the screenwriters offered him to work with, Strathairn does an amazing job. There are no speeches given by Murrow in this film that would indicate what type of person he was--nothing to indicate that, while taking on McCarthy, he had second thoughts. Strathairn creates that lack of sureness. Yet that's not enough to create what I would consider a complete character. Murrow feels flat throughout, through no fault of Mr. Strathairn, I think. He just wasn't given nearly enough to work with. Perhaps that was the point to keep Murrow an enigma, but I don't know if I feel it was a good choice. In any event, I simply felt that there was something missing.
I also felt that the film presents a VERY biased view of history. Not that the film is wrong to elevate Murrow above McCarthy. Sen. McCarthy was a no-good, opportunistic, lout; whenever I see the Dead Zone, I am pretty sure Martin Sheen modeled his character on Minnesota's former-junior senator. What I take a critical view of is the fact that they present McCarthy's downfall as more or less the result of Murrow's taking easy potshots at him. It seems too facile to argue that Murrow brought down McCarthy and even in the movie it feels a little false. History is never that simple. It's complicated and convoluted and the straw that breaks the camel's back is seldom the only straw on the camel's back.
This is not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, and I might have had a different opinion of it had I not expected unrivaled brilliance. I was awaiting and expecting greatness, but I did not get it.