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good
night, and good luck |
director
George Clooney
screenwriters
George
Clooney
Grant Heslov
producer
Grant Heslov
cinematographer
Robert Elswit
editor
Stephen Mirrione
cast
David Strathairn (Edward R. Murrow)
Robert Downey Jr. (Joe Wershba)
Patricia Clarkson (Shirley Wershba)
Ray Wise (Don Hollenbeck)
Frank Langella (William Paley)
Jeff Daniels (Sig Mickelson)
George Clooney (Fred Friendly)
Tate Donovan (Jesse Zousmer)
Robert John Burke (Charlie Mack)
Grant Heslov (Don Hewitt)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 93m
u.s.
release: 10/7/05
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other george
clooney films
reviewed on this website:
- confessions
of a dangerous mind
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A longtime member of the John
Sayles troupe, David Strathairn plays close to the vest. He started
out badly, as an overemphatic Robert De Niro clone in Sayles'
debut Return of the Secaucus 7, but he soon developed
a sort of expressive reticence. That style serves him perfectly
as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck,
an account of the TV news reporter's dust-up with red-baiting
Senator Joseph McCarthy in the mid-'50s. Strathairn's Murrow
makes a virtue out of lack of passion. Nobody could accuse him
of nursing resentments or an agenda -- he's rather colorlessly
dedicated to facts (like his TV contemporary Jack Webb). So when
he risks everything to take on McCarthy, there must be a reason.
I enjoyed the movie as a snapshot
of a time and a mood -- the paranoia infecting all walks of life,
the omnipresent cigarettes, the ability of politicians and television
pundits to quote Shakespeare and assume that their listeners
would be sophisticated enough to handle it (imagine that today).
And there's no question that the film's message, that the powerful
medium of television needs to buck its corporate masters and
bring truth to the viewers of America, is particularly
timely in an era when various lies and distortions about why
we invaded Iraq were swallowed whole by most of the media. Good
Night, and Good Luck gets two stars for the above, though
it lacks a certain sense of urgency, of drama. After all,
we know how it all turned out -- McCarthy discredited, Murrow
vindicated -- and the script, by director George Clooney and
producer Grant Heslov, doesn't find enough twists and turns in
the factual record to create any suspense. The movie is scrupulously
journalistic, sometimes to its credit, sometimes to its deficit
as a movie.
Still, I'll always sit for
an intelligent film involving actual adult conversations. There's
a lot of cross-talk in Good Night, and Good Luck; busy
men in newsrooms fire story ideas at each other, sometimes shooting
them down in the same breath. The relationship between a married
couple (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) who both work
at CBS -- against the network's policy of employing married couples
-- is just about sketched in, but the actors turn their scenes
into quiet conspiratorial comedy. Their fear of being found out
stands in for the larger issue of the people whose names, rightly
or not, have found their way onto McCarthy's unseen list of communists.
Murrow, like many Americans at the time, doesn't really care
one way or the other about communism; what he's after is abuse
of power. His campaign would be equally valid if McCarthy were
waving a list of known homosexuals and trying to scare the country
about them.
At this point, it should be
said that George Clooney (who appears in the film as Murrow's
producer Fred Friendly) is interested in using his power
for good -- not just politically. He does films like Ocean's
Twelve to keep himself bankable so that he and business partner
Steven Soderbergh can make smaller, more challenging films. I
wasn't impressed by what Clooney, in his directorial debut, did
with Confessions
of a Dangerous Mind; he took acidly farcical material
and made it depressing. But the film also established that he
at least had integrity, and wasn't interested as a director in
ingratiating himself with the mass audience. Good Night, and
Good Luck is much more pleasurable, shot in nostalgic black-and-white
by Robert Elswit and given a crackling pace by editor Stephen
Mirrione. Clooney, whose father spent years in broadcast news,
clearly enjoys revisiting the salad days of the medium, when
everything from comedy to drama to news was live. The
real urgency in the film comes not from its narrative and resolution
but from its milieu.
Clooney wears his mantle lightly.
Murrow didn't preach; he simply spoke sensibly and soberly for
rationality and fairness, and so does Clooney. The movie is bracketed
by a speech
Murrow made years later at the Radio-Television News Directors
Association and Foundation. He talks about the responsibility
of television to do more than "distract, delude, amuse and
insulate" viewers -- to be more than "wires and lights
in a box." That, moreso than any message about red-baiting
and its parallels today ("If you're not with us, you're
against us"), is what Clooney -- who has done his
share of distracting and amusing on TV -- wants us to take with
us. Far from biting the hand that fed him, Clooney has made a
valentine to what television once was and -- perhaps -- can be
again.
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