I’ve realised that, to ensure some more consistent content on this blog, I can always just port over some of my short reviews from Letterboxd (I’m, unsurprisingly, named Huncrweo on there if you want to give me a follow). It’s a bit lazy, I’ll admit, but it’s still writing about film and it’s nice to have something short to post every now and then. With that in mind, here’s about five hundred words on George Clooney’s 2005 Best Picture nominee Good Night, and Good Luck, which – spoiler – I did not like at all…
I know that people like this film, but I can’t help but feel that it had all the personality of a high school history lesson. And not from the teacher you liked either, from the one who droned on for twenty mind-numbing minutes and then gave you questions to do from the textbook. Yes, the cinematography and lighting were very nice and the acting was generally quite good across the board, with the particular standouts being David Strathairn and Ray Wise, but Clooney delivers what should be an engaging and emotionally involving story in an extremely sterile fashion.
We’re shown so few scenes set outside of the characters’ workplace that we never get any sense of who they actually are as people, and none of them is allowed to develop beyond how they are when we first meet them. Nor are their actions given any discernible consequences – am I meant to care that the network lost a sponsor? The stakes were high for these people in real life, but you never get a sense of that from the film. There is absolutely nothing to latch onto for the viewer.
While watching, I thought a lot about Jay Roach’s Trumbo. That was a film that explored McCarthyism through a very human perspective, thereby emotionally engaging the viewer regardless of their knowledge of the history going in. Good Night, and Good Luck, by contrast, relies entirely on the viewer already having a degree of investment or interest in the subject matter, because it never presents the situation to us in any compelling way. This is epitomised in the second scene of the film – instead of communicating the idea of McCarthyism and the fear that it instilled in America through more creative means (like, I don’t know, dialogue?), Clooney instead opts to just throw a few paragraphs of scrolling text on screen, a CliffsNotes explanation of the Red Scare. It feels, and I don’t use this word lightly when talking about film because I know how much work goes into each one, lazy.
As a whole, the film just feels slight. It’s just over ninety minutes, and although it feels a lot longer due to the lack of emotional investment, I think that it would have benefitted greatly from an extra half-hour, even forty-five minutes. That way, maybe it would have time to give the characters the same attention that it gave the plot. Maybe it would have been able to make sure that substance existed alongside the style. Or maybe it would be the exact same, except longer. All I can say is that, despite it being by far his most critically-acclaimed film, Good Night, and Good Luck has done nothing to dissuade me of the notion that George Clooney is a great actor but a poor director.
Beyond the Popcorn 