Venice diary part one

Dave Calhoun reports on the new films from George Clooney and Ang Lee and sees a low-budget Irish effort.

Sep  5 2005

Gay cowboys, thieving tinkers, communist witch-hunts and the 'rare' acting talent of Calista Flockhart - all in a day's work for Time Out's film critic at the 62nd Venice Film Festival.

The highlight of Venice so far is without doubt 'Good Night. And, Good Luck', George Clooney's second outing as a writer-director. The film tells the story of the daring mid-50s American TV news show 'See It Now' and especially its efforts to criticize Senator Joe McCarthy's infamous purge of suspected Communist sympathisers.

David Strathairn is excellent as Edward R Murrow, the straight-backed, chain-smoking host and brains behind 'See It Now', a weekly slot on CBS which was produced by his close associate Fred Friendly (Clooney). Smoke and jazz hang in the air. The mood is serious but never overly grave.

Clooney's stylish black and white film is a confident example of historical reconstruction employed for contemporary relevance: it's impossible not to equate McCarthy's paranoid rants – seen here through ample archive newsreel footage – with the current US President's patriotic mantra.

One important caveat though: Clooney has made his film for the converted and already informed. There's little in the way of wider political context or persuasive argument for those who do not share Murrow's – and presumably Clooney's – worldview. Londoners will be able to see the film when it screens as the Closing Night Gala of the London Film Festival in early November.

Elsewhere at Venice, Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal headed up Ang Lee's admirable - if anodyne - adaptation of E Annie Proulx's novella, 'Brokeback Mountain'. The pair play Ennis and Jack, two ranch-hands brought together on a mountainside one summer by fate and a herd of sheep.

Hormones and lust kick in, and before long Jack is spitting on his hand and getting down to some intense bonding with his more repressed and taciturn friend. Sex and violence mix into one. Love and anger collide. It's the start of a lifelong but awkward friendship – and one that is ritually punctured and covered-up over two decades because of their respective marriages.

The result is painful. Ennis can't hold down a family; Jack seeks relief in the backstreets of a Mexican border town. The scenery is beautiful. The sex is frustratingly light (the price to be paid for mainstream acceptance). Still, it remains a love story of the sort rarely told in Hollywood.

On the down side, the Spanish-British co-production 'Fragile' was impossible to bear. A poorly-scripted and unimaginative horror movie set, in a run-down children's hospital on the Isle of Wight, the film doesn't belong in the festival. Nor, on the evidence here, does its lead, Calista Flockhart, belong on the screen.

Any small discoveries? Late one night, I caught 'Pavee Lackeen', a low-budget Irish drama shot on digital, and a film well worth staying up for. Photographer Perry Ogden has produced a drama among the traveller community on the fraying outskirts of Dublin.

His actors are all non-professionals who play out the details and habits of their own lives within Ogden's story. 10-year-old Winnie Maughan is Winnie, a young girl who bunks off school, sniffs petrol, steals, and lives with her single-mum in a caravan. Her performance is remarkable.

The line between fact and fiction is blurred. Ogden offers a compassionate portrait of a way of life. The film will play in the London Film Festival next month and will, I'm glad to hear, be granted a small release at the end of the year.

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