I am sick of all the fawning attention to Cloony for this movie.
"… And Yes, I’m Questioning His Patriotism
LIBERTAS
“Actually, there’s not much up here …”
If you think the mainstream media is loaded with sycophants ready to lap up any and all things liberal, they look like rabid independent thinkers compared to the Hollywood Press. Check out the reviews of George Clooney’s latest propaganda screed at Rotten Tomatoes: yeah, 95 percent. A Whopping 95 percent of reviewers gave this film a positive review. 95 percent!
Now you may ask, who am I to be surprised by this? Have I seen the movie? No. So, how do I know it sucks? Well, because George Clooney’s in it. Duh. But let’s put that aside and compare apples and apples.
Do you remember the reviews for “The Passion?” (Which received but a mere 51% on the tomato meter, ahem). Remember all the hand-wringing from the Hollywood Press about “historical accuracy” and “Biblical accuracy” and “context,” and all the other stuff they made up to flak for their bad reviews and anti-Christian bias? Do you remember that? Well, I find it interesting that only one reviewer held “Good Night, And Good Luck” to the same standard: Stephen Hunter at The Washington Post: washingtonpost.com
“In December 1948, the renowned broadcaster Edward R. Murrow went on the air to denounce the Red-hunters of the U.S. government who had hounded his friend and mentor Laurence Duggan, a former State Department employee, to suicide. …
One can almost imagine the drama: The distinguished newsman, once the voice of blitzed London, hair slicked back, a nub of cigarette in his hand radiating vapors, face as rigid as an Old Testament elder, using that deep voice and crooning rhetoric to lambaste the puny minds of the House Un-American Activities Committee that had so besmirched Larry’s good name that the man had leapt in despair from a 16th-floor window.
But you won’t find it in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” …
One can readily see why. Duggan, as it turned out, was a Soviet spy, code-named “19,” then “Frank” and finally “Prince.”
He was, moreover, one of many Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government at the time.
Deep thinker.
That’s not all Clooney leaves out in his account of the Murrow-McCarthy fight: He leaves out the Cold War, the hot war in Korea, the Venona decrypts that proved how sophisticated and exhaustive the Russian intelligence initiative against the American target was. He even leaves out McCarthy himself, relying on archival footage and sparing himself the ordeal of trying to imagine such a fellow as a human being. He also leaves out nuance, context, empathy, anything that suggests the larger truth that nothing is as simple as it seems. The film, therefore, is like a child’s view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.
Fundamentally, he refuses to acknowledge that, as Joseph Persico wrote in his New York Times review of the 1999 book that brought these realities out, Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev’s “The Haunted Wood,” “the hardest part of these revelations to accept, at least for those of us who deplored the over zealous Red-hunting of the late 40’s and early 50’s, is that the hunt rested on more substance than we cared to admit, the phony posturing of Senator Joseph McCarthy aside.”
The result does a disservice to history: It suggests that McCarthy was an arbitrary sociopath disconnected from a larger issue. That he was just a bad Republican who liked to bully and destroy people out of his own pathology and he was smitten by the powerful moral force of a flawless crusader. Good whupped bad. Good hit bad upside the head. Good kicked butt. But nothing in real life is ever that simple, and to pretend that it is has to be a lie itself. That’s the truth that should be spoken to the power that Clooney represents.
Thus the movie fails to apprehend the true enormity of McCarthy’s crime. Not that he hounded a few lefties out of government or made a stink about the odd Red dentist who got a promotion at Fort Dix, but that he forever tarnished by association the reputations of the security services charged with keeping us safe from the actual – yes, Virginia, there was such a thing – Red menace. That probably did more to help the Soviet espionage initiative than any State Department docum ent that was ever filched for them.”
Major kudos to Hunter at The Post for an even-handed, historically accurate fisking of Clooney’s propaganda piece. And remember, another word for propaganda is “lie.” So, where’s the Hollywood Press now? Hey, guys, over here! We’re over here! Where’s that concern for “accuracy,” and most of all: “context?” Listen, I know you don’t want Clooney mad at you. He might not slap your back in front of visiting Aunt Mildred at Morton’s Restaurant, but doesn’t your integrity mean anything? Doesn’t intellectual consistency and honesty mean anything?
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