Bonsoir, et bonne chance

"Good Night, and Good Luck" is the kind of film that has elicited strong opinions in the IMDb forum. In fact, most of the critics point out at the manipulation of the actual events and what they perceive as character assassination of the late Joseph McCarthy and the role he played during the "witch hunt" conducted by the late senator from Wisconsin. Whether these points are right, or wrong, in the minds of the contributors, most seem to disregard the film on that criteria, alone.

In fact, "Good Night, and Good Luck" shows a time in the American past that served as the model in the way television introduced the format in which the news was going to be shown to the country using the emerging technology to keep people informed. As such, CBS under William Paley's leadership, amassed a lot of talent and it became the yardstick in which other news programs were going to be judged against. George Clooney, in his second directorial job, recreates what he and his co-writer, Grant Heslov, thought about that period at the beginning of the era of television news.

The film has a documentary style that serves well to illustrate the story being told. Most of it occurring in the CBS studios in New York during the fifties. The crisp black and white cinematography, by Robert Elswit, gives the movie a nostalgic look to the way things were done in those days. Mr. Clooney has inserted scenes where a black jazz singer interprets some standard songs as though it might have been the next program following the actual news hour, and act as a buffer in the events being presented.

At the center of the story is Edward R. Murrow, the CBS anchor at the time. Mr. Murrow was greatly admired for his contributions during WWII and his broadcasts from London bringing commentaries about the war to America. Mr. Murrow was a giant in the field, most admired by all Americans because his integrity and the way he presented his stories, which ranged from the sublime, to the ridiculous, as it is the case with the interview with Liberace in Sherman Oaks where he asked the entertainer about his future wedding plans.

The strong cast assembled for the film is excellent. David Strathairn, one of our most versatile actors plays the leading role. His take on Murrow's mannerisms and the way he spoke to his audience in front of the camera is captured with great detail. Mr. Strathairn gives a good performance, but one never really knows much about the man in the way the screen play has been written. Yes, one gets the impression of Mr. Murrow's high ethics, but as far as what made him tick, one has to wait for another biopic to find out.

The ensemble cast plays well under Mr. Clooney's direction. Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Ray Wise, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, and George Clooney are seen in the newsroom as they portray their models under Mr. Clooney's direction.

"Good Night, And Good Luck" is one of the best films of the year. Beautifully directed by George Clooney (who also co-stars), this is a film that exercises a powerful message and social commentary that remains relevant today. Filmed in tight frames of black and white, "Good Night, And Good Luck" also brings back the smoke-filled atmosphere of broadcast journalism and television in the 1950s. The film focuses around CBS journalist Edward Murrow and his attempts to take down Senator Joseph McCarthy through his news program, "See it Now." David Strathairn, playing Edward Murrow, gives one of the best performances of the year and is surely swimming in Oscar territory. Clooney makes his biggest leap in the film industry yet. He, too, may join Strathairn for an Oscar nomination, but in the Best Director category. Filming in black and white, and interspersing news conferences with actual footage of McCarthy, Clooney is an emerging talent worth watching. The ending and the very last frame lets "Good Night, And Good Luck" stay with those who watch it. It ends very abruptly, as if Clooney wants to show the failing, yet lasting effort Murrow had--how he stands as a symbol for the continuation of truth and who is willing to bring it out to the public. The end has a very honest bleak tone to it--we want to see Murrow continue to let the public know what's actually going on in the country, but one man's fight isn't good enough. Clooney chooses a perfect and powerful ending. He makes a bold statement on how public interest in television has contributed to the decay of society, whether it is 1950 or 2005.

Actor/Director George Clooney pays tribute to truth and decency amid distrust and uncertainty in the Communist witchhunts with his recreation of its greatest hero, the newsman of newsmen, Edward R. Murrow, in Good Night, and Good Luck.

In the early 1950's, the Communist scare and the subsequent subversion of citizens' rights was at its apex with blacklists and rampant accusations resulting in ruined lives and careers. Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) was the grand master of the news airwaves in the infantile medium of television. With his show's director, Fred Friendly (George Clooney) and his production team, he picks one obscure news item regarding an Air Force serviceman who is dismissed due to unspecified charges. Murrow and CBS essentially take on the US Air Force amid this climate of suspicion and presumed guilt. Later, Murrow's team takes on Senator Joseph McCarthy by making critical comments of the senator's own words and contradictions. McCarthy retaliates with accusations of Murrow's supposed association with un-American groups just as the parent network, CBS, reels under sponsorship pressure and the unpredictable whims of network president William Paley (Frank Langella). As Murrow and his own staff come under tense scrutiny by McCarthy and even CBS, public reaction and the response of the print media come to the forefront.

Nothing can compare to the words that were written and spoken with such conviction and honesty as those uttered by Murrow. The title of the movie is a direct quote that Murrow employed to sign off each week at the close of his interview shows. The filmmakers (including director Clooney and writers Clooney and Grant Heslov) were wise to let the text stand on its own. They also benefit from good performances from a cast headed by Strathairn (L.A. Confidential, A League of Their Own), a journeyman actor who has finally found a core role to call his own, and he makes the most of it. He gets the mannerisms and cadence down quite convincingly, and while Strathairn may not look exactly like Murrow, he has the persona nailed. Frank Langella (Dave) is excellent as the mercurial Paley whose support of Murrow was tenuous at best. Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) registers in what could have been a more defined role as a doomed newsman whose guilt by association triggers some life changing events. Patricia Clarkson (The Station Agent) and Robert Downey Jr. (Chaplin) as secretly married staffers, Joe and Shirley, round out the cast. Ironically, perhaps the best performance can be attributed to McCarthy himself as newsreels offer a fascinating, perverse glance at the infamous politician whose flamboyance and dogged theatrics doomed the careers of many government officials and film or television actors. The duel between Murrow and McCarthy seems like two heavyweights going at it verbally in the public arena.

The cinematography by Robert Elswit (Magnolia) is crisp and starkly lit in black and white to evoke the past. The production design and costumes are consistent with the period. Just the sight of newsmen typing on old style typewriters or production assistants carrying around film reels instead of videotape or discs is amusing. The editing by Stephen Mirrione (Traffic, 21 Grams) is tight and well paced. At times the studio broadcasts of a female blues singer bridges various sequences in theme and mood. The broadcast of a live network news program is staged with realism and with the frenzy and excitement that only live television could bring. One wonders what TV veterans like Sidney Lumet or Robert Altman could have brought to the table.

Murrow's show was kind of a precursor to the current granddaddy of all prime time news shows, 60 Minutes. It was interesting to see that his was not a perfect career having to mix fluffy showbiz interviews with such personalities as Liberace on his Person-to-Person show with legitimate news reports. At 93 minutes, the film surprisingly seems a bit short. You almost feel like this is a big budget episode of the famous You Are There reenactment shows. The story ends almost abruptly as it begins being bookended by a formal event honoring Murrow in 1958.

A couple of things don't quite work in the film. The characters of Joe and Shirley must come to terms with the network's policy forbidding marriage among its coworkers, but this subplot doesn't significantly serve to move the story forward. Clooney shows a workman-like approach to directing the film but it just doesn't grab you as emotionally as you would like. You sit there entranced by the history but are never fully given to the pathos of its characters. Instead, the film becomes almost a quasi-documentary bereft of much feeling.

As previous films have dealt with the Red Scare and blacklists, this film compares favorably with The Front and the great television movie Fear on Trial. Although the Soviet Union was a major threat to the United States during the Cold War, the accusatory enemy from within was perhaps as great a menace. The implications and parallels to today's political climate and the role television has in shaping perception are clearly the point Clooney and gang are trying to make. Murrow's formal speech, which begins and ends the film's story, is itself a prophetic and sobering commentary and indictment of the possibilities of television and foreshadows the future with amazing prescience. It shows that one man made a difference. Such is the testament to a heroic reporter whose integrity this film manages to capture, albeit in a brief history lesson.

Rarely when an actor tries to direct does it work, and when it does you get "character study" without all the supporting scaffold a real filmmaker would provide.

Clooney is a smart man who knows this. So he structures his projects in ways that are well serviced by what he has to give. The last one was an actor playing a character who created a character within. The structure of the thing was all focused on building and exploiting those ambiguities.

Especially clever were the staging devices. Many were novel and a few were particularly striking.

Now this is a more serious, but has the same values. It is after all a character study, and one that deals with these same two worlds. The man when off the camera, and the man on. Fabricated truth as an act by politicians. "Journalism" as way of piercing through those layers.

Two evils, McCarthy and Paley. Clooney's point is that control over the pipeline is what matters in delivering the "real." So he works with some very studied staging. This movie has some of the best staging in recent memory. It must have taken forever to set the angles and lighting. Fortunately these are so powerful that no scene needs more than two setups. This is the way this cinematographer works for PT Andersen too.

The switch in lighting from when Murrow is on the air to just after he goes off is rather thrilling: both are intense, in fact the on-air lighting is stark. But there is a powerful and visible shift from external to internal energy.

If you just saw the script as words on a page, it would seem boring and preachy. It is the staging that makes this thing come alive, that gives a container for the great acting. The only actor who seems off is McCarthy, which is telling.

I have the book Clooney's dad wrote about movies. Fortunately the son has better insights into what works and what doesn't, and has good intuitions about what to attempt.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Well-acted across the board, I loved the Patricia Clarkson-Robert Downey combo so much that I kind of wish they had their own movie. Stylish and effective cinematography- the darting to and fro, the perpetual smoke, the use of shadow and silhouette. All very well done. And the overall message of the film- that the media and the American public need to wake the *beep* up and pay attention- is one that I heartily commend.

Part of my problem with the film stems from the fact that I am a history student with a keen interest in the time period. And Clooney does nothing to place his story in historical context. He's just taking pieces of a story and expecting the audience to fill in the rest. Like the loyalty oath piece. It really has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It is not explored further in any other scene. It is not really debated. Just one scene, designed to get the audience to recoil and say "wasn't that horrible?" Then it's not mentioned again. No reference to Stalin...hell, no reference to the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the Korean War, or even any aspect of the Red Scare other than McCarthy. There's one line about Alger Hiss near the end, but it provides little context or explication. The film makes it seem like McCarthy was a one-man wrecking crew instead of a particularly ruthless and ambitious politician taking advantage of a fear that was already widespread and deeply penetrating.

And loyalty oaths still exist, by the way, and the truth is that for the most part we accept them. I had to sign a loyalty oath to be a public schoolteacher.

As for the idea that Clooney is trying to make commentary about how society has changed in the past 50 years, I agree that such is his intent. In this regard he is clearly inspired by Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, which his company produced and which he vigorously promoted. But Haynes does it much more elegantly. He shows his characters confounding their stereotypical roles; Clooney merely reinforces them. I wanted to see Patricia Clarkson's character do something other than fetch newspapers. I wanted to see a black character do something other than belt out jazz tunes that lay out the plot like something in an old musical. Otherwise, their presence smacks of tokenism, of the worst kind of liberal condescension. Also, Haynes' film is a fiction commenting on the fictional representations and actual reality of a bygone era. Clooney's is, at least in its central scenes, practically a documentary. Having subplots whose primary purpose is smug contemporary commentary detracts from the versimilitude.

The scene near the end in the office between Langella and Strathairn is the thematic lynchpin of the film. However, this is where I think Clooney most clearly falls short. It seems to me that they address Murrow's earlier complicity in the Red Scare (re:Alger Hiss) surreptitiously by burying it in a set of defensive comments that are presented like a bunch of excuses for the network's moral cowardice. It's scripted in such a way that Murrow does not have to respond. As for the idea that corporations run the media for profit and that the nightly news is more distraction than edification ...well, that was a bold statement when Network came out 30 years ago, not so much now anything more than stating the obvious. I wanted more from this.

I almost feel like Clooney was torn between making a documentary and making something truly scathing in the Network vein. As documentary the film is brought down by its lack of context, which is a shame because Strathairn's line readings are chillingly good. As social commentary the film simply doesn't say anything particularly perceptive, and at times it comes across as liberal bourgeois moralizing.