A Powerful and Pointed Docudrama

Rating: 10/10 (24 October 2005)

"Good Night, and Good Luck" is a powerful docudrama that is a parallel to "All the President's Men" in vividly demonstrating the importance of the fourth estate. Like "The Crucible" used an earlier period to contemporaneously criticize the 1950's, co-writer/director George Clooney uses the 1950's to criticize politics and journalism today.
The irony is emphasized through the structure of the film. With less opening background crawl than "Star Wars," the film opens at a dinner in 1958 honoring Edward R. Murrow where broadcasters are congratulating themselves for his role and he delivers a portentous challenge to television news, that we of course know has rarely been fulfilled.
Then flashing back to 1953 by utilizing lengthy excerpts of kinescopes of Joseph McCarthy, "the junior senator from Michigan" as he's frequently called, including a marvelous throw-down of Shakespeare quotations, and hearings he held, as well as recreations of Murrow's serious and celebrity interview broadcasts, the editing and spacing adds commentary.
In a riveting performance, David Strathairn doesn't just copy Murrow in look and sound but adds subtleties like a raised eyebrow and hand motion that add volumes of meaning.
The film makes clear that journalists are relevant to their reporting and that the times forced them to be, as everyone has secrets and standing to protect that can get compromised or can compromise a story -- from a new mortgage, to school tuition, to an ex-wife, to actual memberships -- as Strathairn's Murrow intones "The fear is in this room."
While the film only glancingly notes that the Communist hunt hysteria had already been going on for at least six years before Murrow's pieces, including the coverage in newspapers that are the team's sources of information, it does establish right away that he had already personally signed a loyalty oath, to indicate that he had tolerated quite a bit before deciding enough was enough.
The hypocritical context of primitive 1950's television is established particularly well. In addition to the casually sexist language, we see all the participants chain smoking away, we see a Kent cigarettes commercial, reminding us how the government and corporations were lying to us about the affects of cigarette smoking (which would kill Murrow a decade later through lung cancer). It is followed immediately by an interview with Liberace that is such a cover-up of his homosexuality that even though Murrow has agreed to conduct these celebrity interviews "to pay the bills" for his investigative journalism, he can't bring himself to completely play along with the farce.
The chapter breaks of songs by Dianne Reeves also represent how CBS was otherwise going on with entertainment programming (as well as a tribute to the director's Aunt Rosemary), emphasized by a line that Milton Berle was then the most trusted name in television.
But all these references and cultural touchstone may well go over the heads of anyone under 50, and there were none in my audience of a fairly crowded suburban multiplex with defective projection quality. Will they even know that Murrow was a patriotic icon for his war time radio broadcasts from the London Blitz, or what were the Wobblies that McCarthy accused him of being a member of, or who was Roy Cohn, or even the flashes of RFK as a staffer on the HUAC committee, PM Magazine, the Red Channels newsletter editor who confronts one of the reporters, or the senators who discovered their backbones after Murrow showed that the emperor had no clothes. This will doubtless be the first they hear names such as Bill Paley and Frank Stanton.
Unusually for this kind of film there is no concluding scroll that reminds viewers of the distinguished careers of the participants, such as Don Hewitt, producer of "60 Minutes." The dialog does have an ironic exchange about what happens to McCarthy.
The connections to today's issues of the Patriot Act and the means justifies the ends in anti-terrorism, particularly now that television is used far more slickly than by McCarthy, are emphasized by Strathairn's Murrow several times stating that it is the methodology of the accusations he is concerned with, as he stresses process, procedure and the rule of law overcoming innuendo, implication, smears and out and out distortion and lack of facts.
Clooney's Fred Friendly creates an easy partnership with Strathairn's Murrow, as he's just barely off the TV screen as they create the famous broadcasts together, even as Friendly jokes about Murrow risking the most as the most visible.
In addition to a beautiful black and white texture that smoothly integrates the original footage, Clooney's gliding directing helps to build the tension. Several scenes of silent waiting for count downs and a phone to ring are as tense as "Apollo 13."