Documentaries can do it, too

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2008)

The directorial debuts of famous actors is a stunt that little interests me. There's a lot of young aspiring directors who are probably struggling right now to get that immense privilege and might never get it, regardless of their creativity and ideas. I can't help thinking those Hollywood stars are depriving them of some opportunities. Thus, I always wind up watching an actor's film with high skepticism and little hope, rarely finding my prejudices shaken.
George Clooney is a nice guy. Or at least that's how it feels on the other side of the screen. He doesn't always have great parts and I keep having nightmares of him in a Batman suit, but there's something about him that feels friendly. Naturally, that had no effect whatsoever on my prejudices: it was just going to be an actor's film. To his credit though, he didn't choose the easy way.
He picked a true, political-based story from a not-so-glorious era of the United States history and shot it in black and white. If this wasn't a risk-taking enterprise, I don't know what is; maybe his next film, Leatherheads, about a football team in the 1920s ? For these choices alone, kudos to Mr. Clooney. Rare are the filmmakers willing to explore some little-known periods or events of the past, especially when not backed by a best-selling book.
The film takes place in the mid-fifties, right when senator Joseph McCarthy was holding public hearings against anyone suspected of having sympathies for the communist party. This is taught at school, generally in one or few sentences. What I didn't know is how McCarthy's downfall came. And this is precisely what the film is looking at. One of the persons who raised the alarm against McCarthy's unruly methods and attacks on civil liberties was a CBS journalist called Edward R. Murrow.
Through his TV show "See it Now" he started to conduct a series of report questioning the legitimacy of these actions. Murrow was a brilliant speaker as you can judge by the few enlightened speeches scattered along the film, which are certainly all his. I found this and the archive footage, spread throughout as well, to be the most interesting. And that's the problem I have with Good Night, and Good Luck; the same result could have been achieved with a one-hour documentary, just putting together footages of McCarthy and Murrow's speeches.
Nothing else really matters, the subplots are so thin they're almost nonexistent. The relationship between Robert Downey Jr and Patricia Clarkson's characters is here just to fill the remaining space and the only thing you will really remember of it is that it was not allowed for a married couple to work at CBS. Same goes with the dealings between Murrow and his boss, played by Frank Langella. It's slightly better because there's a bit of tension, but eventually nothing comes out of it and it just looks like a filler. What about what happens to Don Hollenbeck ? Well, being from an event that actually took place, it would have fitted in our documentary alternative.
The direction was quiet, not very inspired, an actor's film in short, with the addition of the natural elegancy provided by black and white tones. You can barely say more of the actors. There wasn't a bad performance, there wasn't one outstanding either. David Strathairn was convincing and well cast, yet again his main task was to deliver Murrow's speech in a subdued, convincing way. This done, most of his job was done. I find it hard to imagine this film was an Oscar contender. It was a modest, unambitious production, using a feeble narrative to present documentary-like facts. It was instructive, both in the domains of history and TV production, and may well have been its sole real value.