I’m a big fan of anything pertaining to the Cold War. Commies? I am there. Intense fear of Soviets — where do I sign up? I just love the paranoia, it kills me retrospectively dead. Naturally, this film was right up my alley.
It was an all around solid film. Good strong performances by everyone involved; I was vaguely surprised by Jeff Daniels, to be honest. It was absolutely fantastically composed, each and every shot was so dyanmic it killed me. The black and white could have been a little more black and white but other than that, it looked quite wonderful.
My problem with it, though, is that it never conveyed any real sense of urgency about the problem of McCarthyism, without which the point of Standing Up For What’s Right and crusading against The Tyrant falls a little short and a little underwhelming. Conversely, you didn’t get much of a feel for Why Communism Is Evil™ that would make McCarthy pursue the course of action that he did. Obviously McCarthy is a pretty household name in this day and age and you don’t need much of a background to understand the size of the net he cast over leftists and leftist sympathizers, but it would have been nice if they had been able to convey any of emotion fuelling both sides of the battle.
The other problem is that it could be ridiculously heavy handed. The timing of this film is not coincidental, and as any film student knows, you watch a film to understand not only the era it is depicting but also to understand the sociopolitical climate the film itself was made in. George Clooney couldn’t have been more obvious if he had substituted the word “terrorism” every time someone mentioned Communism. This doesn’t make the strongly moral monologues in the film any less potent or true, it just makes me feel spoon fed as an audience member. Then again, maybe he felt middle America needed to be spoon fed, I don’t know — the question is, will the average middle American see this film? (This is a rhetorical question.)