Surprisingly low key docudrama.

Rating: 8/10 (21 May 2007)

I approached this film warily. Here you've got George Clooney as writer and director and actor, and who IS George Clooney? A self-proclaimed liberal with a background in afternoon television dramas. He's made a movie about a shameful episode in America's past in which lives were ruined and there were few heroes. And the movie focuses on Edward R. Murrow, who is widely acknowledged as among the first and most deserving of those heroes.
Well -- look out, now! I figured we were due for a colorful, bombastic civics lesson with every point underscored and overwritten.
But, nope. Instead, Clooney has come up with a low-key black-and-white drama about Murrow that shows him as mirthless and doesn't dig into his personal life to give him a more human, hale-fellow-well-met identity. We don't even know where he's from. David Strathairn doesn't smile once. Here's Murrow, warts and all. He doesn't come across as much of an idealist either. He's strictly a newsman. Neither he, nor his able supporting cast, give a single speech about freedom of the press or due process. Only once, in one or two sentences, does he dig in his heels when negotiating with his boss, Bill Paley, about the show. He asks Paley what he wants. Paley replies that he doesn't want to get a bellyache from not knowing what's going to happen next on Murrow's show. And Murrow replies evenly, "Well, Bill, that's the price you have to pay." The threat of firings and resignations linger unspoken in the air.
So -- totally against my expectations -- the story isn't hyped at all. There are no speeches fulminating against McCarthyism. (I don't think the word "McCarthyism" is even used. Maybe it should have been. Recent polls show that most high school students believe Watergate took place before 1900.) No dramatic music, no music at all except occasional inserts presumably taken from Columbia Records which CBS operated. Even the suicide of one of the news staff's colleagues is short and silent. And nobody says anything afterward about what a great guy Dan Hollenbeck was, although we see Murrow mention him briefly at the end of a broadcast. Murrow paid for his freedom of speech with a commitment to "Person To Person" interviews with celebrities. They were supposed to be like Robert Oppenheimer but instead they became Liberace. Note when the lights go out after the Liberace visit and Strathairn looks up and rolls his eyes slightly.
Murrow smoked all the time and died of lung cancer. Yet the film ends at a party given in Murrow's honor, a tribute. A cheaper approach would have followed Murrow through his medical exams, his death bed speeches, his funeral, the rousing perorations of his colleagues -- but the film has none of that.
In fact, the movie seems to have been deliberately stripped of every quality that might give it commercial appeal. No one shouts at anyone else. No one gets angry. No one swears. People don't fight or have hot sex. Nobody wrenches anybody else's head off and spits down the neck cavity. This damps the drama. I'm not sure how much appeal this film actually had, except for older people, or for people comfortable enough in their skins to absorb a message that isn't pounded into them -- a dwindling few, I'm afraid. How many young people know who McCarthy was or what he did? It's the kind of movie that demands the viewer's attention. It doesn't compromise. "LA Confidential," a fine movie in its own right, is set in the same period as this movie. But in "LA Confidential," nobody smokes. Why not? Presumably it would turn off some more-than-usually moral people in the audience who would interpret it as a promotion for tobacco smoking. In "Good Night, and Good Luck," just about everybody smokes cigarettes. Why? Because just about everybody smoked cigarettes in 1952, that's why. That's what I mean by "uncompromising." If you watch this, don't expect to be led by the hand through the evils of overzealous patriotism. Condemnation and imprisonment for reasons kept secret are taken for granted as wrong. President Eisenhower is seen on TV speaking briefly about habeus corpus. Many of us seem to have forgotten the meaning of the term or the dangers of ignoring due process.
That last sentence I wrote is more preachy than anything you'll find in this film. Clooney is no Oliver Stone. He trusts the viewer to be able to distinguish good from evil, and it's very flattering to find a writer/director willing to do that.