Good Night, and Good Luck

George Clooney's second film as a director, this intense docu-drama about Edward R. Murrow's fight against McCarthyism as an anchor on CBS News, is not just significantly better than his debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. It's better than anything Clooney's producing partner, famed director Steven Soderbergh, has released in about a decade. I think this is one student who may be poised to overtake the master.

Good Night and Good Luck makes no overt attempt to tie McCarthyism and his fright tactics to the present-day political administration, and that is it's greatest strength. This isn't some anti-Bush polemic, some piece of what Moriarty on Aint It Cool humorously refers to as "liberal porn." Clooney simply presents an accurate piece of media history, about an early moment when TV newsmen and their corporate backers collided over a story, and invites the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions about its current relevance. The result is not just a brilliant piece of filmmaking, but arguably the most intelligent and important American film thus far this year.



Clooney and screenwriting partner Grant Heslov have infused Good Night and Good Luck with so many observations and ideas, it's almost bewildering at first. What they've done is relate this story about TV in the 50's as realistically as possible, but with an eye to the future. What we're seeing is the early days of TV, behind-the-scenes conflicts that persist to this day in their infancy. All the obstacles preventing Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) from reporting the truth about Joe McCarthy and his smear campaign against so-called "Communists" still exist, but have become far more persistant and successful.

Clooney opens the film in 1958, after the events of the movie have finished, with Murrow receiving a broadcaster's award. Rather than a happy little thank-you speech, Murrow lets forth an angry diatribe about the state of TV news. He complains that TV is only used as an entertainment device. If TV doesn't educate and enlighten a citizenry, he fears, if it only provides them with an outlet for escapism. It becomes "just a box full of wires."

And as soon as we see the film's first reproduction of a Murrow broadcast, we realize he's right. That sort of news has completely disappeared from the airwaves. In his nightly broadcast, Murrow spoke in the mannered style of an academic. He was precise, informative and unconcered for whether or not a story was glamorous or likely to hook an audience easily. He read his stories in clipped and measured tones from a small seat in front of a curtain, turning to look at a monitor behind him whenever a clip was played. (Roger Ebert tells me that Clooney's father worked in early TV, giving him particularly astute insight into the look and feel of an old-time broadcasting studio. It's surprisingly claustrophobic.)

More similar to current news television is Murrow's side project, a show that CBS forces him contractually to do called "One on One," in which he interviews some mindless celebrity for a half hour. In the film's funniest sequence, footage of Strathairn as Murrow is intercut with old footage of singer Liberace answering the real Edward R. Murrow's questions. Soon enough, the conversation gets around to just why it is that Lee has never been married...

This is just one way in which Murrow's concerns for the future of TV have become an unfortunate reality. Hard-hitting news stories are often pushed aside to make way for human interest entertainment.

Even more worrisome are his clashes with CBS President William Paley (Frank Langella, in an amazing, intimidating supporting performance worthy of an Oscar nod) and executive Sig Mickelson (Jeff Daniels). In one startling scene, Murrow and Friendly are preparing a report on a cadet expelled from the Air Force because his father attended Communist meetings in the 1930's, when Mickelson interrupts them and urges them to stop.

He's worried that the story is biased, clearly anti-McCarthy, when it should be "fair and balanced." But is it the role of journalists to simply record and report the arguments of both sides, or is it their responsibility to seek out the truth behind those claims and report that? Mickelson (and Fox News) seem to prefer the former, while Murrow (and George Clooney and me) clearly prefer the latter.

And as Murrow and Friendly get closer and closer to the truth behind Senator Joe's wild claims about communists infiltrating the American government, their opposition gets increasingly fierce. McCarthy appears on CBS to claim that Murrow has been a communist himself since the 30's, a member of the news team is sidelined because an ex-wife attended some socialist rallies, and an old lefty who has remained on CBS as a night-time anchor (an excellent Ray Wise) faces daily torment from sneering columnist from the right-wing Hearst newspapers.

Murrow and Friendly use McCarthy's own words against him, filling their reports with damning video of McCarthy at HUAC hearings. Clooney embraces the same technique. Rather than have an actor portray McCarthy as a hysterical bully, he simply edits footage of the real McCarthy into the film. (Since both are in black-and-white, it segues surprisingly well). It's pretty hard to argue against himself, so McCarthy resorts to character assassination. If he can simply undermine Murrow enough, he believes, everyone will just ignore the man's nightly broadcasts.

It doesn't work, largely because Murrow was already such a respected reporter after his work during WWII in reporting from the Battle of Britain. Clooney seems to muse aloud whether or not we even have a journalist with those kind of impeccable credentials today, someone who could face off against the most powerful and persuasive voices in our government in order to expose them as liars and frauds? Even if we do, and I'm not certain that we do, will this person be willing to sacrifice their career and reputation to do the right thing?

This is a thoughtful and political film, and yet it is never dull or preachy. Rather, I found it kind of riveting, counter-intuitive for a film with only a few locations and told in such a straight-ahead, matter-of-fact style. The movie is so focused on Murrow's conflict with McCarthy and the behind-the-scenes mechanisms of TV news in the 50's, there really isn't time for a lot of character work, and yet the strength of the ensemble of actors manages to make the newsroom environment feel authentic. In fact, the only real "sub-plot" in the movie concerns a married couple of reporters (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) who must hide their relationship from the suits upstairs.

Robert Elswit's beautiful, creamy black-and-white cinematography adds to the feeling of authenticity, and provides for some of the most emotional moments in the film. One sequence in particular I'll highlight...The first anti-McCarthy broadcast on CBS has just finished airing. We see CBS President Paley sitting motionless in his darkened office, the television flickering but silent in the background, while the phone rings repeatedly. It's an intensely beautiful shot, and also a great, subtle moment...All this time, we have seen Paley as the enemy of truth, but here we realize that even this imposing, powerful man is beholden to others and must answer to someone for his actions. He's the president of a TV network, yet he's only a pawn in the game.

As I said before, this is an important film. Important not just because it speaks to key issues of the day, or it reminds Americans of what journalism, even TV journalism, used to be about. Important because it takes these issues and blows them up, shows them as larger than the past few years or the Iraq War or even George W. Bush. Clooney's film is about the use of fear to amass power, it's about greed and corruption and scare tactics and smear campaigns, and about how the only way to conquer these evils is to spread truth. And not just a convenient truth, but the whole truth.

The final shot, rather than some elegaic tribute to the heroism of Murrow, is a close-up of a television on which Ike Eisenhower appears, speaking about habeus corpus. The notion is that Murrow, McCarthy, Bush, they are all just individuals who made specific choices. This is a larger story about America, what it stands for, what it could one day stand for, and the sacrifices it will take to keep it all together.

It's a stirring and emotional story, easily the best film about journalism since Michael Mann's 1999 film The Insider, and possibly the best since All the President's Men.