Clooney's alternative ending is a clue to the morality of this tale.

Rating: 9/10 (3 December 2005)

Alternative Endings: Good Night and Good Luck
George Clooney's elegant film, "Good Night and Good Luck," playing locally at the Gulf Breeze Cinema 4, frames itself with a notable speech Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) delivered from a brightly lit elevated lectern at the National Radio and Television News Directors Assocation convention in 1958. The speech was delivered near the end of Murrow's career as a CBS journalist, just seven years before he died of brain cancer at age 57.
In the opening scene, the stylishly-dressed audience smiles up at Murrow with good humored expectation, much as any audience might show eager anticipation at the start of a new show. By the end of the speech, to which we return as the film concludes, the audience has fallen silent. It is in shadows. Is the audience stunned by what has been said? Angry? Bored? We can only guess what the people are thinking -- if they are thinking at all.
Inside this frame, Clooney (who co-wrote, directed, and plays the role of Fred Friendly) tells the story in lush black and white cinema photography of Murrow's dramatic exposure of the witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. In Clooney's hands, as a number of reviewers take the trouble to explain for the many readers who do not know of it, this is a tale of individual journalistic courage during a very dark time in our nation's history.
Our former wartime ally, the Soviet Union, had become a Cold War adversary. Nuclear war seemed imminent. Propaganda films taught us to "duck and cover" in school when the bombs start falling. Neighbors shrouded their homes in canvas, vainly trying to hide the bomb shelters they were building for personal use. School teachers, employees of private companies, journalists, and millions of others were forced to sign loyalty oaths on pain of losing their livelihoods.
* * * The film certainly presents, front-and-center, a tale of journalistic courage in confronting the evil of Joe McCarthy. Not just the courage of Murrow, either, or of his See It Now team of journalists and producers. There were others whose names are now all but lost to history, like Elmer Davis, I.F. Stone, George Seldes, Herb Block, Bill Mauldin, to name just a few.
Standing in for all of them in Clooney's movie is the tragic figure of Don Hollenbeck. Hollenbeck was the Walter Cronkite of his day -- a voice as recognizable and trusted by Americans as any in the history of electronic journalism.
* * * With a film message like that, most professional reviewers of Good Night and Good Luck have been unable to resist commenting on the contemporary political parallels raised by this historically grounded story.
* * * Other than Denby, few reviewers go beyond the main drama of Murrow's personal heroism to suggest, as honestly as Clooney's film does in its sub-plot with the character of Bill Paley (Frank Langella), what the root cause may be for our modern media's malaise. But Ben Bagdikian and Robert W. McChesney put it forthrightly in their latest books, The New Media Monopoly and The Problem of of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century.
Owing to a series of new laws and FCC regulations beginning in the late Reagan era and a dramatically changed legal environment that now endorses monopolies rather than prosecuting them, today, as Bagdikian documents, "five global-dimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel, own most of the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio and television stations in the United States."
* * * As McChesney writes, this monopolization creates a "crucial tension... between the role of the media as profit-maximizing commercial organizations and the need for the media to provide the basis for informed self-government."
* * * For Roger Ebert, who liked it very much, Clooney's film "is like a morality play, from which we learn how journalists should behave."
One suspects Murrow would have disagreed. Twice during the film -- once, just as he did on the air when confronting McCarthy -- Murrow quotes Shakespeare's famous line, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
If Good Night and Good Luck is a morality play, it's not just about how journalists should behave. It's about what kind of media policies we, the public, should be demanding at the ballot box as well as in our homes.
A clue to this lies in the darkly amusing anecdote Clooney shared with Cole Smithey of Arriviste Press shortly after the film opened. Asked if he had given any thought to an alternative ending, instead of closing with Murrow's parting words from the 1958 speech, Clooney said they actually filmed one:
We had basically made a montage of the greatest hits of television moments, and then as they rapidly decline it was down to the O.J. chase and then the piece, done in L.A., where there was a car chase and the guy sets his truck on fire, and he takes off all of his clothes, and he blows his head off on live television. And you could hear the people in the background, in the newsroom, laughing and the guy says, "There's your lead news story."
* * * It doesn't have to be that way. But it's up to each of us to write an alternative ending.