The photography, costumes, and the music in this movie were great. But style is where the brilliance of this movie ends. The film presents a highly skewed view of historical events, oversimplified and tailored to fit the biases of George Clooney.
Joe McCarthy is shown only in newsreel footage making him a 2 dimensional character. This really diminishes the impact. He certainly isn't the ugly threatening villain the filmmakers would like us to believe in. There is tragedy in the story of McCarthy. He played a high-stakes political game and self-destructed in public. Why that sort of real human 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 historically unbalanced. The Clooney clan didn't know how to put the McCarthy era in context. Younger generations and the masses who don't read history will wonder what all the fuss was about. With tens of millions of people dying in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin paranoia was impossible to avoid. The horror of Stalin's party purges make the politics portrayed in this movie look like something from the Sunday comics.
OK, I get the idea that Clooney likes "smooth jazz" music. The music is great, and this, unfortunately, is also one of the films biggest problems. That music was not widely popular in the 1950's. The pop charts were full of light vocal and musical show tunes, and this would spell box office disaster today. The real pop music of the 1950's 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 does the music in this film.
Controversy always has more than one side. If Clooney were a good filmmaker he would have given the film the type of dramatic tension that could turn it into serious entertainment. 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.
Joe McCarthy is shown only in newsreel footage making him a 2 dimensional character. This really diminishes the impact. He certainly isn't the ugly threatening villain the filmmakers would like us to believe in. There is tragedy in the story of McCarthy. He played a high-stakes political game and self-destructed in public. Why that sort of real human 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 historically unbalanced. The Clooney clan didn't know how to put the McCarthy era in context. Younger generations and the masses who don't read history will wonder what all the fuss was about. With tens of millions of people dying in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin paranoia was impossible to avoid. The horror of Stalin's party purges make the politics portrayed in this movie look like something from the Sunday comics.
OK, I get the idea that Clooney likes "smooth jazz" music. The music is great, and this, unfortunately, is also one of the films biggest problems. That music was not widely popular in the 1950's. The pop charts were full of light vocal and musical show tunes, and this would spell box office disaster today. The real pop music of the 1950's 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 does the music in this film.
Controversy always has more than one side. If Clooney were a good filmmaker he would have given the film the type of dramatic tension that could turn it into serious entertainment. 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.