Did I miss something in "Good Night, and Good Luck"?

[saoirse]

@vaderspal

He was almost single-handedly destroying lives and careers of innocent people just because they didn’t happen to agree with him politically, and nobody was going up against him publicly. Or, when they did, they were hauled in front of the committee as communists. In such an environment, just speaking up publicly is an enormous risk.

Jack Shafer wrote an article pointing out that Morrow was not so all alone as the movie suggests. Other journalists had already gone after McCarthy, the Republicans on his subcommittee were plotting his overthrow with the Democrats, and Richard Nixon had distanced himself from him (after January of 1953, the Republicans no longer had any reason to tolerate him). That’s not to say Murrow wasn’t courageous, but he wasn’t the singularly courageous individual you might have thought he was from the movie.

[Zsofia]

Hey, I like Out of Sight as much as anyone, but I don’t think you’re only allowed to watch fluff pieces like that if you don’t like Clooney’s Very Serious Outing. I didn’t necessarily need it to be a big emotional drama, I just saw that as one way I would have liked it better. I could have been perfectly happy if it were just as non-personal if it involved me in some other way - there just wasn’t really any tension in the movie for me. It was pretty to look at, and a great technical accomplishment, it just didn’t do anything for me. I just still don’t see what was so different for you guys in this one than for me, because this is normally the kind of thing I just eat up when nobody else likes it.

[Yookeroo]

@Captain Amazing

I admit, I didn’t love the movie. There were some things I liked a lot. The cinematography was great, and the acting was good, especially David Strathairn’s Murrow. It sort of fell down on the plot, though, because there just wasn’t much to make the story compelling, or much conflict.

What was the tension in the film? Whether to go after McCarthy or not? There was no “pro-McCarthy” voice…everyone agreed that it was a good thing. Whether the network staff would let them? The network, in the film, didn’t complain. Whether the network would find out that Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson were married and fire them? Not enough time was spent on that, and neither were developed enough characters to make it an issue? The tension between television as entertainment and television as education/a force for change? That’s the most developed tension in the movie, but it falls flat, in my opinion

I found this somewhat refreshing. I’m glad they didn’t force the tension and conflict, forcing it to have “movie moments”.