A Powerful Film That Pleads for a Return to Meaningful Journalism

Rating: 10/10 (15 March 2006)

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is a brilliant piece of film making, a film that recreates a period in our history when gossip mongers and fear exploiters took the lead for a terrifying few years that threatened to extinguish civil rights forever. Not unlike now! And that is one reason this film carries so much resonance: the story of the bravery of popular news reporter Edward R. Morrow (David Strathairn) and his associates Fred Friendly (George Clooney), Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson), William Paley (Frank Langella) and the crew at CBS is one that begs for re-creation in the way the news is reported, analyzed, and serves the rights of the public to be truly informed.
The story is the 1950s McCarthyism Communist Hunting that terrified the country unchecked until Morrow et al challenged the Senator's accusations and methodology by simply quoting the statements McCarthy made in the television series See It Now. Morrow and his associates did not elect to smear McCarthy: they instead elected to bring to the public's quivering attention just what the sick mind of McCarthy was doing to innocent people. It was an act of bravery on Morrow's part and on the part of everyone connected with See It Now.
George Clooney continues to impress as a quiet, subtle voice who doesn't seek the limelight for his brilliant mind, but rather uses it to enter the arena of emerging patriots - the good kind. He wrote the script with Grant Heslov after much research and investigation and then gathered a gifted crew of actors (including himself) and directed the film using the atmosphere of black and white photography (credit cinematographer Robert Elswit) in the almost exclusively interior claustrophobic set of the television station to give the ring of honesty that pulsates this story to its powerful end. Strathairn is brilliant as Morrow, but then so are all the cast members in this ensemble effort.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is an immensely entertaining film on every level, but the fact that it is released in such a realistic fashion at this particular time in the nation's precarious history makes it a film that should be seen by everyone. The DVD added commentary by not only the writers and actors but also the people still living and the children of those who aren't is informative and sensitively poignant. Lightning can strike in the same place twice. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp