Good Night and Good Luck: A Standard Waving From the Past

Good Night and Good Luck: A Standard Waving From the Past
by Dileep Rao

Many people have written about George Clooney’s second film, remarking that it is sincere and intelligent but perhaps not thematically larger than its source material, that it has nothing directly useful about our modern media culture because it’s just ‘too different’. Which is nonsense. The more ‘different’ the media has become—diversified, craven, deplorable, dumber, and less responsible—the more we can look back at the compromises and bravery that newsman and interviewer Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) had to embody in his news day.

And he still told the truth, worked for justice without throwing his hands up and giving a tacit smile that says it's just too big a fight to fight. Fight he did, every day and for unpopular but just causes. He felt the hand of corporate hacks reaching for his throat and held his nose interviewing soft subjects on his Person to Person show, that day’s People magazine of sorts. What Murrow would have to have done to face the horror of the modern landscape shudders the soul.

The film concerns the events of Murrow's broadcasts with producer Fred Friendly (Clooney, terrificly efficient and generous here) in dealing with Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his Anti-Communist witch hunt. Clooney’s film is a restrained exercise in the newsman as hero genre. Murrow is largely as he was: smart, straight, pointed and clearly on the other side of what he knew was wrong.

Imagine if Brokaw had called Bush administration officials on the carpet for the doctored intelligence on Iraq and the 9/11 failures instead of bowing down the nearest waved flag or penning yet another tribute to the ‘greatest generation’ whose values he seemed unwilling to defend in his journalism. Stratharin is uncanny in capturing the essence of Murrow. By allowing Senator McCarthy to play himself, the palpable fear culture of the time is both sharply presented without the coating of fiction and its absurdity highlighted. By comparison, we seem unwilling to see the stupidity of our own times.

If this film’s review is conflated with an editorial of our modern journalism, so be it. The strength of the film is its raising of a standard of journalism, of overtly contouring the price of freedom, the courage to stand apart from the safety of the herded masses and call a bully a bully. The paucity of such a force in the modern media is harrowing. The film is in places quite funny and passes by without making itself ornery. There is no preaching in this film, it lives as a document of the times, and I’m sure Clooney wanted to inoculate himself against such charges, but Good Night and Good Luck might have benefited from a bit more propulsive drama. Life isn’t like that, but movies maybe ought to be bit more than life.

The acting is very good (particularly Strathairn, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson and Frank Langella; it’s nice to see Langella try again). The writing is clever and tight but it might have needed a bit more starch, clarity in structure for its drama. The arrival of the scene we know is coming (“At long last have you no sense of decency, sir...”) could have been much more clearly layered so its pay off was larger. It’s a quibble, though; the film is terrific, well worth seeing.

Dileep can be reached at dileep@babblog.com.