The Rocketdog Blog

Good Night, and Good Luck. Plus: I Don't Watch the Oscars, I Just Blog About Them

I don’t care about the Academy Awards. Even causal observers realize that, for any given year, the nominated films and performances aren’t necessarily the best among contenders. This is largely because official selections are determined as much by multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, paid for by the studios and specifically targeted at a few hundred Academy voters, as any notions of critical merit. I also don’t care for the self-important pomp of Hollywood studios pretending that the ultimate measure of a film’s success is anything other than its bottom line. While I do believe that most studio types have aspirations towards making quality films, this element is always, always, held subservient to the net gross. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that; movies are a business, after all, and they cost a shit ton of money to make. But the Oscars – and the annual September - December deluge of studio-produced faux-indie Oscar-bait films that precede them – are nothing more than a result of Hollywood trying to affect its own measure of artistic credibility. It’s a farce enabling the movie industry to perpetuate the fantasy that, in the end, it’s something above all the dollars and cents. It’s not. Sorry, Hollywood, I’m not buying into your shameless orgy of self-deception. You’re a bunch of money-grubbing corporate whores, and one night of manufactured pomposity isn’t going to change any of that. So it is for these reasons that I never watch the Academy Awards. I tend to avoid pretty much all discussion of them, and whether or not a film has won or been nominated for an Oscar generally has no influence over whether or not it’s one I’m going to add to my Netflix queue.

[Insert big sigh here.]

Until this year. No, this year I’m going to try to care. It’s not because the movies are better (always debatable). It’s not about my man-crush Jon Stewart hosting the telecast, which I’m probably not going to end up watching anyway (I had thought about watching last year when Chris Rock was the host, but copped out when I remembered that I’d still have to put up with all of that ridiculous Oscar crap in-between Rock’s emceeing).

No, this year it’s different. Because this year, folks, this year…it’s about having a blog. It’s about me not having anything else to post about on that blog. It’s about this idea I have about writing a separate post reviewing each of the five of the Best Picture nominees, and doing it before the show airs on Sunday.

Yes, this year, it’s about setting goals. Goals like, “I’m going to blog about 100 movies this year.” Except that it’s not, because this time I’m going to do better than living up to only 4 percent of that goal. Also, the Olympics are over, and I have nothing else to do with my free time.

“Now wait just a damn minute,” you may be saying to yourself. “Five reviews in six days? Good lord, he only wrote four over all of last year! Is he crazy?” I reply: Perhaps. But just as the Academy Awards are Hollywood’s attempt to perpetuate the fantasy of its own artistic relevance, blogging about the Best Picture nominees perpetuates my fantasy that people actually read my blog. And thus, like the Oscars, as an exercise it is absolutely vital. To that end, I begin:

Oftentimes, films rooted in historical fiction, such as biopics, or those depicting a certain event, suffer from too much sexing-up. Artistic embellishments of the kind added for dramatic effect by writers, directors, and producers to make a story more appealing to an mass audience can sometimes result in material that is out-of-touch with its subject, or that is so unbelievable as to lose its credibility as a realistic account. With Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of legendary CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow’s on-air clashes with Senator Joe McCarthy, as seen from the point-of-view of Murrow and his news staff, I’m wondering if the opposite isn’t true: the filmmakers had so much respect for their subject – and communicating its topical messages – that they forgot to make the film dramatically suspenseful.

That’s not to say that the drama isn’t there – there’s certainly loads in the source material, and screenwriters George Clooney and Grant Heslov manage to parcel out plenty of well-played tense moments along the way, such as when Murrow (played the excellent David Straithairn) and his co-producer, Fred Friendly (Clooney), first make the decision to take on McCarthy. In the end, though, the action never reaches a boiling point; there’s really no dramatic climax to the film. I hope I’m not giving too much away here plot-wise (this is a matter of historical record, after all, but if you really don't know anything about this movie and really hate spoilers, you might want to skip ahead to the next paragraph), but a typical example of GNGL’s dramatic shortcoming occurs when Murrow’s staff finds out about McCarthy’s pending investigation by the Senate, an event that will eventually lead to McCarthy’s censure and the end of his own investigation. All of the real action of this scene happens off-camera; instead, we hear the news via a telegram read out loud in the news room. This exposition via a secondary source is all we ever get of this event ever occurring. Instead of dramatic payoff, we only see the result: the relieved smiles, the joyful back-slapping among the reporters – but the moment itself, the humiliation and the eventual downfall of Senator McCarthy, all happens miles away, in another location.

Part of the reason for these shortcomings may be in GNGL’s use of archival footage to present public figures of the day, such as McCarthy himself. While this technique does a fine job in setting the period of early 1950s America, immediately transporting us back in time in a way that a digitally manipulated recreation could never achieve, in retrospect this decision may have been the rope the filmmakers were using to bind their own hands. In giving us all of this great archival footage of McCarthy, his witnesses and his colleagues in the Senate, the filmmakers ensure that fictional representations of these people are impossible. For that reason, these characters, so critical to the dramatic development of the film, are forced to remain peripheral; we can’t be present with McCarthy when he hears the news about his pending investigation, because there is no archival footage of that event happening. Instead, we as the viewer have been locked in the newsroom with Murrow and Friendly, while the most important events in the story happen outside its doors. With this in mind, the filmmakers may have been better off leaving the archival footage, fascinating as though it may be, to the DVD extras. (Incidentally, I just thought I’d mention that test audiences’ chief complaint about the film was that the “actor” portraying Senator McCarthy was “too unbelievable.” If you’ve never seen footage of McCarthy in a full anti-commie fervor, he’s something to watch.)

One other beef with the film: GNGL is in fact one of those constantly beating-you-over-the-head “message” movies. In a year when an arguable four of the five best picture nominees are overtly liberal “message” movies, GNGL is not a standout for pressing an agenda. I don’t have a problem with any of that, per se, but GNGL is not a subtle film. Unlike, say, Brokeback Mountain (which I will get to later in the week), GNGL states its message, or rather multitude of messages, in finger-wagging snippets of dialogue ostensibly spoken to other characters, but clearly aimed at the audience. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not a huge problem, and frankly I think it’s easier to get away with this sort of thing in a historical fiction than in a straight-up fiction fiction (I have no doubts, for example, that Murrow actually spoke in the terms he conveys in the film). But blatant statements of the BIG MESSAGE of any film via dialogue spoken by the characters always comes off as a little clumsy, and GNGL has several of these moments.

Labels: metablogging, movies

posted by nick @ 11:28 PM