Good Night and Good Luck (2005)

3.5 stars out of 4

The Bottom Line:

Quickly forgotten by just about everyone after it was shut out of the 2006 Oscars, GNaGL is a worthy (if brief) look into one of television's most interesting figures and what was arguably his finest hour. December 21, 2008

Nice but not that well

After the Oscar Award evenning. We can absolutely trust this movie is going to be a master piece of script, performance and cinematography.
Well i do not deny the force of this factors, it is a great movie indeed. And Clooney did a splendid work on it. His fellow friend Soderberg can be proud of the legacy he remained on him but the movie is boring.

It is not about the black and white technique, is not about the dense dialogs, is not about the topic of the plot, is just the rhythm and development of the story is too much for the one hundred and peek minutes of the movie.

Great performances, i personaly love Clarkson, Downey Jr, Clooney and Strathairn. Must see it but i am still not convinced further than an oustanding movie. December 13, 2008

Distorted history

We all know that what Senator Joe McCarthy said in the 1950s about the communist threat facing America was filled with lies. But how many of us also know that much of what today's news and entertainment media says about the McCarthy Era is equally flawed? McCarthy died discredited in 1957, and his lies fortunately died with him. But the distortions that today's news media use to conceal their own misdeeds during that era remain with us. This film is an illustration of that. It's not only propaganda, it's poorly done and implausible propaganda.

The clue lies in this film's portrayal of McCarthy, a portrayal that has hardened into dogma among most professional journalists. Senator McCarthy, the film tells us, was such an immensely powerful figure that Edward R. Murrow, a journalist at CBS-TV, displayed great courage in talking him on in 1953.

Does that make sense? In 1953, McCarthy was the junior senator from Wisconsin and had been in that office for only six years. It's not a position that carries with it much political power. Today, most Americans don't even know who holds that office and certainly wouldn't hesitate to criticize someone with so little power. In contrast, Murrow had been an internationally known and well-respected reporter since May of 1938, when he covered the German annexation of Austria for CBS radio. The American public had been hearing him for fifteen years and millions tuned into his TV show, "See It Now." Look at the numbers. McCarthy had been nationally known only since his Wheeling, West Virginia speech in February of 1950, a mere three years earlier. Three years or fifteen--who really had the most influence and power?

Of course, that doesn't mean that McCarthy wasn't powerful or that no one need fear to tangle with him. Even President Eisenhower, who loathed McCarthy, was forced to bide his time, waiting for the senator to self-destruct. But McCarthy's power did not rest in who he was. It rested on what the national press had made out of him. That's the key to understanding why the media in this country has a vested interest in distorting the history of that era. It was they who had turned a politician with no particular talent and a propensity to lie into someone millions of Americans saw as a brave and honest opponent of communist infiltration into American life.

If you want a historical parallel, think of former Vice-President Albert Gore and the millions who believe what he says about global warning. They eagerly follow his hints of dark conspiracies by oil companies. They want dissenting voices silenced, and our lives forcibly reorganized to remove what they think is a great danger. Former vice-presidents aren't that powerful. It's the media that gives Gore a platform from which to speak and rarely challenges what he says. The real problem isn't the fear-monger. It's a hysteria-prone press lacking in judgment.

Substitute a communist conspiracy for one by oil companies and you have the McCarthy Era. It was created by the press and not McCarthy. That's what this film fails to point out. Murrow had to take a bold stand against McCarthy because for three years many hundred of reporters and news outlets had repeated what McCarthy said without critically examining it. Over and over, McCarthy made claims that did not stand up to close scrutiny. The closest this film comes to admitting that is in its oft-repeated statement that reporting the news should mean more than reporting what each side in a controversy was saying.

I'll close with a brief look at the film as a film. It's the fifties, so be prepared for more smoking than you see in films set in the present. Murrow himself was heavy smoker who died in 1965 of lung cancer. Also, this film focuses almost exclusively on the world of CBS. The larger world only appears in brief flashes, typically on television monitors.

--Michael W. Perry, editor of The School of Journalism in Columbia University: The Book That Transformed Journalism from a Trade into a Profession December 9, 2008

A GREAT movie. Thank you George Clooney for making this

I love the black and white.

I will forever respect George Clooney for funding, producing and directing a movie that centers on a TRUE American hero. A time when news and entertainment were separate divisions on network TV and their were great and courageous journalists. Not the "brainless", talking head, "soap opera" stars of TV.

Great, great acting and done in a realistic, adult way, where we can "feel" the tension and think to ourselves about what would we do if we were in the late great Edward R. Murrow's shows or the head of the CBS news department. He lets the story be the star and use the great subtlety of black and white and the actors and their interactions be the star.

Edward R. Murrow should be remembered with pride as an American who whose responsibility he felt to other American's who depended on him to be factual, truthful and present the truth was greater than his personal ambition. What a rare trait in this "I, I, I" world.

Jon September 25, 2008

Clooney has chops

George Clooney has to be, if not the most talented guy in Hollywood, certainly the luckiest. A former Sexiest Man Alive, according to People magazine, scion of a wealthy show business clan, a tv star, a movie star, and now a successful director. His first film, Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, on wacky tv game show host Chuck Barris's fantasies, was a sober look at a mentally disturbed man, much better than highly lauded screenwriter and director Paul Schrader's similar Auto Focus, on tv star Bob Crane's descent into pornography. But, we've all seen this before- a big star thinks he can make films, makes a first film that is lauded- think Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and on and on, and then starts pumping out sheer dreck.
Well, scratch that with Clooney, who also wrote the film with his producer Grant Heslov. His latest film, Good Night, And Good Luck, which tracked CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow's 1953-1954 battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he belittles backhandedly as `the Junior Senator from Wisconsin', and his own network, deserved all the accolades it got in its Academy Award nomination. Of course, its nomination was for its political stance, and the relevance to the civil and human rights abuses going on today, in the failed War On Terror, but just because it got recognized for the wrong reasons does not mean it's not a worthy film.
What separates Clooney, in his first two films, from the above named actors, is that he is simply not content to tell a straightforward story. In both films he uses different filmic techniques, frames scenes in different ways- in this film letting the camera be a static fly on the wall, and generally shows that he knows what to do behind a camera, as well as in front of one. Several things show why this works. First off, Clooney and his cinematographer Robert Elswit (Magnolia) shoot the film in black and white, which always lends an `old', historic feel to a film. Secondly, he makes the audacious choice to use footage of the real Senator McCarthy and his victims, rather than using actors. In doing so, we see how truly deranged and maniacal McCarthy was. Latter day apologists try to insist he wasn't as bad as all that, and that there were real communists in the government.
This is all true, but they were never a threat, merely a convenient scapegoat, and McCarthy's many false accusations and smears allowed the handful of real threats to later get off by claiming McCarthyist tactics were used against them. McCarthy falsified records, lied, claimed he had proof he never revealed, harassed people, never produced their accusers, practiced cowardice in the name of patriotism, and tried to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (ala Guantanamo Bay). The Left, especially in Academia, has much to answer for in its support of Stalin and Mao, and their regimes which murdered manifold more people than the Nazis, but the average laborer/fellow traveler merely saw The Party as a refuge from the vile practices of Big Capitalism at its worst. To equate a few rabble rousers with a plot to enslave the nation is to blur all colors between black and white, and like trying to make the case that David Duke was as great a threat to world peace as Hitler. This was why a Communist sympathizer like Alger Hiss was found guilty and sent to jail on a technical perjury, barely related to the treasonous crimes Richard Nixon accused him of, and which history has exculpated him for, yet is viewed as if he passed on atomic secrets like Julius Rosenberg. And it was in this gross conflation and addle-minded simplification that we see that the true threat to freedom was in the lying, manipulating, and fulminating madness of McCarthy, amply captured on film, and nicely left undiluted by Clooney, so that `selective editing' charges are baseless.... The film just misses greatness because Clooney makes a few errors. First, he has a pointless side story about a married couple (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) at CBS that violate the company rule against married employees, then he has a subplot about a man, Don Hollenbeck (Ray Wise), McCarthy drives to suicide (done in Martin Ritt's Woody Allen starring film The Front, with Zero Mostel's character), and finally the film's soundtrack is a bit weak, with a jazz score that seems inapt to the gravity of the situation. But, these are all minor demerits. The use of classic 1950s commercials and footage more than makes up for those weaknesses, and really gives a claustrophobic feel, at times, that only heightens the drama, the outcome of which, is known. Yet, this fact does not lessen the intensity because Clooney gives a great performance, and Strathairn, as Murrow, is simply brilliant. It is a testament to his brilliance (mostly unseen in small, independent films, such as those by John Sayles) that this great performance is almost routine in his canon.
September 11, 2008

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