Good Night, And Good Luck is a fine-looking, whip-smart, right-on drama, all precisely the sort of attributes we’ve come to associate with its director and co-screenwriter, George Clooney. (Unless, of course, you happen to be George Bush, the planet’s only known non-Clooney fan.)
Inspired by ideological on-air skirmishes between CBS broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (Strathrain) and Redfinder General, Senator Joseph McCarthy (playing himself through the magic of seamlessly incorporated archive footage), the film sounds a cautionary note from history.
During the early ‘50s, Murrow’s primetime news show, See It Now would launch a series of assaults on McCarthy’s commie-baiting methodology, hastening the dread Senator’s retreat. Good Night, And Good Luck plays these events as pulsating, streamlined theatre, staying intensely focused on Murrow and his chain-smoking, hard-drinking newsroom colleagues to better recreate the jittery paranoia of the era.
Though himself a noted Hollywood pinko by the fierce standards of mainstream American media, Mr. Clooney has never lost his cool on the soapbox, and Good Night smoothly delivers its political charge without jeopardising its value as an elegant entertainment. Slyly, the film smuggles in an agenda. Murrow, as brilliantly realised by Strathairn, is presented as a hero from more noble, swashbuckling times, quoting Shakespeare between reports and bravely contesting the propaganda of the day, despite pressure from programme sponsors and the CBS chairman (Frank Langella).
Is there a message here about today’s conglomerate-dominated media? Well, duh, and to ram the point home, the film is book-ended with Murrow reasonably requesting that policy in the Middle East be given the same airspace as mindless game show opiates.
Beautifully shot in lush monochrome – all crisp white wisps of cigarette smoke and mirror black slicks of hair pomade – the grandeur of the project is somewhat undone by tight televisual framing and an equally parsimonious narrative focus. (A subplot involving Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson is barely there at all.)
Still, part of the achievement, I guess, is that Clooney has nearly convinced us of Good Night’s slightness. He’s a clever one, and that hatful of Oscar nominations is well deserved.