Nov. 16, 2005 - Issue #526: Sex, Lust & Love
You’ve got to be good to be lucky
George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck takes us back to the
darkest days of McCarthyism
Whereas many a biopic ends with some congratulatory ceremony for the protagonist, often designed to redeem him or her of any wrongdoings hinted at in the proceedings and send us home full of false cheeriness, George Clooney’s second film as director, Good Night, and Good Luck actually begins with such a scene and reverses its usual purpose. We see legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn) sternly finish off yet another cigarette, step up to a podium, presumably to accept the honour of his tribute with customary graciousness, and coolly follow his applause with a decidedly downbeat speech addressing the overwhelming complacency of the television media to a crowd of quickly sobered but hardly surprised faces. The year was 1958.
Good Night, and Good Luck (not a biopic, really, but a film that recalls a short, tumultuous period in the lives of a few notable American public figures) is titled after Murrow’s simultaneously sincere and spooky signature sign-off, and is largely set about four years previous. Over a period of months, Murrow, his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) and the rest of the staff of CBS’s See It Now engaged in an unprecedented prime-time confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy amidst the height of the anti-Communist paranoia that affected virtually every aspect of everyday American life. It begins with a decision to conduct an investigation into the Air Force’s dismissal of Milo Radulovic upon allegations that his father and sister had alleged Communist sympathies—though no evidence was made public—and this single case, encapsulating a blind, unjust aggression not only toward ideologies but also, it would seem, race, effectively creates the spark that helps to set fire to a nation’s latent resentment and sense of estrangement from its own government-sanctioned organizations.
A model of elegant low-budget period filmmaking, the scenes are largely kept within the television studios and offices and are shot in a velvety black and white that effortlessly absorbs the multitude of greys needed to match the actual television footage Clooney smartly employs throughout (rather than convolute matters with an actor interpreting McCarthy, Clooney simply allows the real McCarthy to speak for himself). As a result, Good Night, and Good Luck is as wholly transporting as a film can be, not taking us to a realm of fantasy, but to the early days of the Cold War, in which the invisible blanket of fear and repression is made palpable through the film’s claustrophobic insularity.
Clooney, whose father was a broadcaster, co-wrote the film with actor Grant Heslov, and together they have created something impressively spare, rhythmic and dense, with overlapping voices accentuating the collaboration and urgency permeating the production meetings for See It Now, and the obsessive focus on work, to the exclusion of superfluous exterior info, heightens our immersion into the issues being presented by Murrow and his crew. Anchored by Strathairn’s highly detailed but distinctly contained central performance, and buoyed by the those of Clooney, Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson (as a couple whose own secret marriage is a curious microcosm of the film’s larger social dynamic), and especially by the performance of Ray Wise, the controlled flurry of action fascinates with period detail, but it never succumbs to the sort of quaint filters often employed to make the ’50s seem like a “simpler” time. And the jazz performances that bracket the film (however unrealistic it may be to see a black woman performing jazz in an American network studio in 1954) offer eloquent transitions that don’t so much alter the course of things as they do hover mist-like in the soup of tensions.
“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” Murrow advises us in just one of the many moments that emphasize the relevance of Good Night, and Good Luck in our highly polarized times. But the air of melancholy that pervades the film may also be an indication that the days in which men like Murrow could rise to the fore, days in which broadcasters not only wrote their own material but did so for a literate, reasonably intelligent yet broad audience—with whom no one could make assumptions regarding their political sympathies—are long gone. Murrow fought for some balance between entertainment and serious debate on television, but we now live in times where the two have become so intertwined, the issues so hysterically skewed, that any voice grounded in simple decency and thoughtfulness is all but lost in the noise. Yet regardless of how pessimistic or hopeful you want to feel about it, there’s still no denying that Hollywood’s handsome actor has given us one of the finest American films of the year. V
Good Night, and Good Luck
Directed by George Clooney • Written by Clooney and Grant Heslov • Starring David Strathairn, George Clooney, Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson • Now playing
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