Delusions of King George

This comment appears in The Times today.

CLIVE JAMES once wrote that hearing a few of his own liberal opinions coming from the mouth of Jane Fonda was enough to set him wondering if the John Birch Society was so bad after all. I have a similar reaction to George Clooney.

”We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood,” Clooney declared at the Academy Awards. “I think that’s probably a good thing. We are the ones who talked about Aids when it was only being whispered . . . We talked about civil rights . . . I’m proud to be part of this Academy.”

Only four black performers have won Oscars for Best Actor or Actress, and three of them were in this century. Only six black actors or actresses have won awards for supporting roles. Hollywood lags far behind the military as a force for the advancement of black Americans. The film industry is out of touch not in its achievements but in its historical certitudes. When the director Elia Kazan received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, much of the audience declined to applaud. Kazan’s crime had been to testify, 50 years earlier, to communist involvement in the entertainment industry.

Yet Kazan was more historically perceptive than is Clooney’s directorial debut, Good Night, and Good Luck (nominated for Best Picture). The film’s central character, the television anchorman Ed Murrow, was not, as Clooney portrays him, a lone figure standing against Senator McCarthy. Murrow was very late in countering the blustering demagogue. Clooney gives no indication that anti-communism and McCarthyism were distinct forces, or that communist infiltration of government and civil society was a genuine threat, though McCarthy grossly exaggerated it.

At least Good Night, and Good Luck is cinematically impressive. Syriana, for which Clooney won Best Supporting Actor, makes up for an incomprehensible plot with a stock of political caricatures so extravagant that the film might as well have been made as a cartoon. An enlightened Arab leader chooses to cross American interests; nefarious oilmen scheme; the CIA, with an unrealistic degree of competence, plots mayhem and assassination. Even the Islamist suicide bomber is a noble figure.

If Clooney wishes to be applauded for the power of his ideas, it would be wrong to withhold judgment. He is Michael Moore for the MTV generation.