It's healthy to read beyond the headlines

Rating: 7/10 (10 November 2005)

Red Scare? Or Red Herring?
Like the turning of each page of a crisply unraveled newspaper, "Good Night and Good Luck" unfolds itself just as plainly. There were promises of headlines too. "McCarthy!" they all said. But the story of "Good Night and Good Luck" is not about McCarthy. It is about the future oftelevision. It describes how corporate pressures under threat of loss of advertising revenue combined with political fears of retributionwould inexorably lead to the decline of television as a powerful medium for provocative, and substantive commentary and transform it into what David Strathairn (Eight Men Out, Limbo) who plays Murrow, said in one of his very last lines, "Just wires and lights in a box."
The film is done in black and white, and opens in the year 1958 at a banquet held in honor of the film's central character, legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow. While waiting to be announced, Murrow stands off stage, his trademark cigarette ever present, held poised in his signature style. He appears uncomfortable with what he is about to say. Pushing through the smoke he arrives at the podium and tells his audience that everyone in the room, including himself, has become "Fat and complacent." He warns them about the perilous direction television may be heading in.
In straightforward fashion the film switches to 1953, the year that Murrow publicly clashes with Senator Joe McCarthy. Cramped into tiny studios and control rooms, that at the time Newsweek described as looking like the, "dashboard of a Model-T Ford," Murrow and his perennial associate Fred Friendly,(George Clooney) broadcast a popular nightly, documentary style newscast called "See it Now." Aside from playing Fred Friendly in the film, George Clooney is both writer and director. "Section Eight," a "Warner Brothers" based film and production company that partners, as its owners, Clooney and film veteran Steven Soderbergh, adds "Good Night and Good Luck," to their list of credits,in addition to George Clooney's directorial debut film, " Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the irreverent tale which purports that "Gong Show" host, Chuck Barris was a covert CIA operative. "Section Eight"president, Grant Heslov,(CSI and Fox's X-Files) wrote the screenplay for "Good Luck," and apparently wrote himself an on screen part as Don Hewitt, the director of "See it Now."
Hewitt directed the landmark 1953 broadcast that publicly challenged Senator McCarthy and his methods by using McCarthy's own words, collected from various newsreels, against him. Between this and McCarthy's highly anticipated response, "Good luck" manages to continually reinforce its unusual cadence by adopting an unconventional style of storytelling comprised of long, and awkward silences. The reasons for the silence aren't emphasized, because there aren't any reasons for it. The emphasis is on the simplicity of the silence itself, and more often than not, the long awkward silence isn't awkward at all. And the silence is merely a pause. Pausing to take time to watch Murrow pick a flake of tobacco off of his teeth. Pausing to hear the sound of a newspaper having its creases ironed out, or the jiggling of ice being twirled with one's fingers in a half empty, well deserved glass of scotch. These scenes have density and dimension, and are a woven fabric of smoke and quiet, watermarked over imagined conversations and gestures that give clues to thoughts that don't exist. The film's concentration on what is usually omitted,like the sound of someone exhaling and the movement it causes to the thousands of dust particles that flutter in search of light, is precisely what defines the style and signature departure from formula that "Good Night and Good Luck" successfully achieves.