George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck is now wrapping up its run in Australian cinemas: I saw it weeks ago, but didn’t write a review partly because I was busy with other things, and partly because I was a bit underwhelmed by it. After the rapturous reception it has been greeted with (notably the 5-star reviews of David Stratton and Margaret Pomerantz) I expected a lot more. There are a lot of good things about it – notably David Strathairn’s wonderful performance as Edward R. Murrow, and George Clooney’s direction – but it struck me as terribly written. The screenplay seems almost to deliberately downplay drama: there was never a feeling of just how all-encompassing the fear of McCarthy must have been, and Strathairn’s Murrow seemed to outplay McCarthy at every turn. The first serious consequences for Murrow and his colleagues don’t happen until the very end of the film.
I’m glad it’s successful, though, because it is obviously playing on parallels with the current political situation, and its encouraging that it strikes such a chord. It’s one of a number of films that conservatives are getting upset about at the moment, aghast at the left-wing ideals that Hollywood movies espouse. It isn’t the first film on their list: perhaps it’s too embarrasing to be seen to defend McCarthy; perhaps they want to avoid highlighting the parallels between anti-communist and anti-terrorist hysteria; or perhaps the anti-gay and anti-transgender cards (in relation to Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica) are easier to play. Yet the “Hollywood is full of crazy liberals” argument is popping up in op-ed pieces everywhere. I responded to a particularly bizarre such column from Paul Gray the other day, but this sort of argument isn’t limited to the Newspaper for the Stupid.
For a really great disassembly of such an argument, click here for John Rogers’ hilarious demolition of a particularly dimwitted piece by Jason Apuzzo on the conservative film discussion site Libertas. Rogers makes all sorts of great points that people of all political persuasions should keep in mind when they argue about politics in film: that “Hollywood” isn’t some organised club that has a single unified objective; that studios are much more interested in making money than sending messages; and that if you want to argue that the Oscars have been hijacked by special interest groups, you probably shouldn’t do so by arguing that Revenge of the Sith should have gotten a nomination for Best Picture.
However, one point in relation to which I would quibble with Rogers and agree with Apuzzo is that there are, indeed, a suprising number of left-wing films being made. Of course, for Apuzzo this is a sign that evil liberals lurk under the beds like communists: for me it’s just a ray of hope in grim times. (I never cease to be amazed at the way in which many conservatives still manage to complain that they are victims of political correctness and liberal media bias, even while the leader of the free world is not only singing their tune, but doing their dance moves.)
I made this point a while back in this post, where I pointed out that post-9/11 Hollywood has shown a suprising reluctance to lurch to the right: I say surprising, since you might expect their films to reflect the prevailing mood of the day by playing on revenge fantasies. We saw lots of this kind of filmmaking in the 1980s, yet in the last few years Hollywood has instead given us films like Munich and Revenge of the Sith and Good Night and Good Luck and Batman Begins and Land of the Dead and Fahrenheit 9/11, all of which explore the way in which fear and terrorism can lead society down dark paths.
Yes, I’m repeating myself. But this isn’t noted nearly often enough. As a fairly random example, take this essay by Greg Ng at Senses of Cinema, which I stumbled across the other day. Ng, like so many others, takes the Peter Biskind view – that Hollywood dumbed down irretrievably when Jaws and Star Wars came along – pretty much as a given. He praises the Sidney Lumet / Paddy Chayefksy collaboration Network and concludes that modern filmmaking doesn’t stack up against it:
Chayefsky’s script is simply much more ambitious, and verbose, than anything Hollywood offers up for contention these days. Network‘s assumption that audiences could respond positively to what is essentially a dense, wordy screenplay, set amongst current events and asking uncomfortable questions, was vindicated… Hollywood’s ‘best and brightest’ have rarely offered much in the way of criticism since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.
To be fair to Ng, some of the examples I have cited weren’t around when he wrote, but his essay certainly shows the danger of being too broad in writing off Hollywood’s capacity for social commentary. Good Night and Good Luck isn’t “set amongst current events” (although its commentary on them is obvious), but it’s certainly ambitious and verbose, it certainly asks uncomfortable questions, and it certainly assumes audiences can absorb a dense, wordy screenplay. So, for that matter, does Fahrenheit 9/11, despite my own reservations about it, and the care that Ng takes to argue that it somehow doesn’t count. (In describing it, he even puts quotes around “documentary,” without actually specifying what it is that causes him to be cautious about the term: if he’s implying that its argumentative nature disqualifies it, he’s managed to tweak another of my pet hates.)
To try to draw a more-rambling-than-usual post together, I’ll simply note the irony that I find myself agreeing – on one very narrow point – with conservative pundits rather than lefty film academics. Hollywood films are trying to make you think, and they’re saying worthwhile things.