Yet More Hollywood Tripe...

Rating: 9/10 (29 October 2005)

(...Is Available For Closed-Minded, Know-Nothing, Proudly Ignorant Types. Feel free to watch it if a fresh prospective on history will challenge your world-view too much).
Above all, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK, is a very well made film that shows the skill with which George Clooney brought CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND to the screen was not a fluke. It is not a bio pic or a broad message film. Instead, it concentrates its attentions on what happens when one man decides to exercise his constitutional rights to challenge a public servant whose actions are causing real pain to American citizens in the name of "national security." The story stays laser-focused on Edward Morrow and his team as they grapple with the impact this servant is having on their beliefs in what America stands for and their personal lives. It is done with style, class and gripping actual drama. To paraphrase the usual definition: melodrama concerns how the plot pushes the characters forward, drama shows it is the characters who push the plot along.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is about an issue that could not be more relevant today: the issue of destroying individual rights in the name of protecting them. Anyone who trots out the hoary claim that this film is about attacking communist-hunters has either not seen it or cannot grasp the difference between questioning methods versus questioning goals. Several times it shows Morrow telling his television audience that he finds communism to be against his beliefs and rightfully has no place in the US.
What he objects to is the way Sen. McCarthy used methods better suited to the Soviet Union to search it out, not caring if such methods would destroy innocent American lives. Milo Radulovich was not the only US citizen who was shown at the time and history has confirmed was guilty only of being yet more meat for the grinder of McCarthy's tactics. The fact that he was a man serving his country and tried (contrary to our laws) entirely on the basis of "sealed" very questionable evidence is what makes his inclusion the heart of Morrow's reason to attack McCarthy's methods.
Yes, this is a film about ideas. If that makes it "preachy" to you and you like your movies to simply entertain you, then the other 99% of what gets released each year is probably more your speed. Because at the end of the night, the only two valid sides in discussing this film are pretty simple: you either believe believe that destroying even thousands of innocent, loyal American lives is justified to protecting us when some elected officials claim it is; or you think that to do so pretty much invalidates the principles the country were founded upon.
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK says it believes the latter and could have easily closed with this, my favorite quote about real patriotism: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin