Political commentary at the price of artistic quality

Rating: 5/10 (4 March 2006)

It seems pretty clear that George Clooney set out to make Good Night and Good Luck to remind us, in this time, of where fear-mongering and zealous patriotism can lead us. The value of the allegory per Se is debatable but its cinematic quality hardly is.
This film starts out very formal, cold. The black and white cinematography does put us in the correct time-frame, but it does little to capture what black and white cinematography usually does best -- the intricate emotions, the facial features and movements, and other subtleties we notice when we don't have 16 million colors to look at. Why? Because there are no emotions. From the start to the finish, this movie is cold - not chilling, but numb.
The documentary-like style occasionally hits the jackpot. Nouvelle vague directors, whom Clooney seems to emulate occasionally in the choice and sequence of shots, did so brilliantly. Clooney does not and you as a viewer end up questioning the necessity to make this a fictional movie.
Really, about a third of it is stock footage of Sen. McCarthy. Another third of it is of Strathairn hosting the TV program as Murrow. Granted, some of these are "behind-the-scenes" and "making-of" shots that were not aired on CBS then, but it still seems like footage of actual Murrow could have been used instead with little difference.
The other shots are occasional conversations between various characters, which seem to be forced, and repetitive, always along the lines of: Murrow: We need to tell the truth. Other character: But it's dangerous (not profitable/insane/too risky, etc.) Murrow: We need to tell truth and expose McCarthy anyway.
There is one scene in the whole film where I thought - here, I will get to see the real Murrow, the person behind that expressionless host of a TV program, this superhuman martyr for the truth. It is when he is lying in bed with Clarkson's character. Even then - their conversation is business, the steadfast impersonal resolute determination ever-present, and you are left disappointed.
Some will say that the film is valuable because it allows the actual events, the facts, the words spoken by Murrow & co. to stand on its own without too much editorializing, artistic license, etc. But it seems that Clooney takes this to the extreme. He makes a movie that may as well have been a documentary. And if he truly believes that the words of Murrow and McCarthy can tell the story by themselves, then he should have just had stock footage of those two and spared us the unbearable monotony of poorly scripted, identical scenes, meant solely to tie together the various pieces of wisdom espoused by Strathairn's character.