Review of Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) by Luigia L — 08 Mar 2009

I always thought of George Clooney as one of those good-looking latin-lover actors, that can only play one role and make women scream. It's pretty clear I hadn't seen his work as a director until two days ago.

Well, now I have, and I completely changed my mind about his skills (sorry, George!) and his taste in films.

He's great when he plays the charming-but-funny characters in the Coen brothers' O Brother Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, but he's even better when he's behind the camera, because he has a touch that I haven't seen in many directors. First of all, the fact that he's the director but also one of the characters (and yet, NOT the main character) is a brave and uncommon choice for an actor-director. And second, I don't think I've seen many "political" films better than Good Night, and Good Luck.

The whole idea of talking about a problem so actual as the public phobia for a certain social, political or - as it is nowadays - religious group, and the way the US government exploits that phobia to incarcerate and condemn people without trial or without real evidence using a 1950s setting is pure genius. It makes you think about what's happening now, with the Bush administration detaining Afghan prisoners in Guantanamo without evidence and denying them any human rights, but it also makes you think about how history repeats itself, and how we never learn from our mistakes (since apparently Bush is merely copying his predecessor Senator McCarthy). The choice of black and white for the shooting is also very elegant, and the fact that the whole political tension and "action" in the film is given exclusively by means of dialogues and speeches - the whole film is almost entirely shot in one or two rooms, yet another brave choice - marks Good Night, and Good Luck as a real jewel in its gendre, and proves that Clooney is indeed an interesting and talented director.