Style over substance, no real controversy here!

Rating: 2/10 (16 March 2006)

Good Night and Good Luck has more style than substance. The photography, costumes and the music were great. But that is where the brilliance of this movie ends.
Joe McCarthy is shown only in newsreel footage making him something of a 2 dimensional character. This really diminishes his impact. He certainly isn't the ugly threat the filmmakers would like us to believe in. There is a tragic and human drama in the story of McCarthy. He played a high-stakes political game and self-destructed in public. Why that sort of real drama is completely missing from this film is beyond me.
There is no attempt to explain the real reason for anti-communist paranoia and that makes the film feel historically unbalanced. The sort that Clooney associates with apparently thought there was no need to put the McCarthy era in proper context. But younger generations who don't remember these events firsthand will wonder what all the fuss was about. With tens of millions of people dying in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin paranoia on all sides was impossible to avoid. The party purges under Stalin make the politics portrayed in this movie look like something from the Sunday comics.
The very cool "smooth jazz" music in the movie is great and that, unfortunately, is also one of the films biggest problems. That style of music was not widely popular in the 1950's. The pop charts of the time were full of the sort of light pop vocal and musical show tune crap that spells box office disaster today. The real pop music of the 1950's was the type of thing that made the rise of rock and roll inevitable! A dramatic orchestral score could have heightened the impact and would not have drawn undue attention away from the story as do the musical performances in this film.
Controversy always has more than one side. There simply isn't much room in Clooney's world for type of real controversy that would have given the film some dramatic tension and turned it into serious entertainment. In short, the film presents a highly skewed view of events oversimplified and tailored to fit the biases of one man. The unintentional paradox is that while presenting the story of a neutral journalist, Clooney shows a distorted view of the surrounding historical events. I guess it is just too bad for us that the real world is so out of touch with George Clooney.