Pity the media that need heroes

Rating: 9/10 (3 November 2005)

Skillfully prepared docudrama about the fateful confrontation between broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954, when Murrow was the first major media commentator to take McCarthy to task for his unscrupulous and enormously damaging witch hunt tactics while chairing a Senate committee investigating communists in government and elsewhere.
Clooney and his colleagues made a brilliant decision to shoot in black and white (shades of gray, really) and use enhanced archival kinescopes and television footage of McCarthy and his hearings - rather than recreating these scenes using an actor (who on earth could even come close to portraying McCarthy's evil presence?) - juxtaposed with newly shot material depicting the acted roles of Murrow (by David Strathairn) and other prominent figures at CBS TV at the time.
Virtually the entire film takes place within the news department studios or occasionally at a nearby bar where the staff relax. This is a film about the intense work and sweat of a big network TV news staff in that era, informed by two consultants to Clooney who were part of the team that worked elbow to elbow with Murrow, Joe and Shirley Wershba (played in the film by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson).
Another brilliant touch is having the jazz singer Dianne Reeves perform several songs from the era, numbers whose lyrics are often, ironically, in touch with the issues being depicted in the film.
Strathairn, who has made a career of performing quality supporting roles in 70 films since his debut in 1980 in John Sayles's "Return of the Seacaucus 7," gets his chance to shine in a star turn here and makes the most of it. He is entirely convincing as the chain-smoking, dour, principled, hard hitting, eloquent Murrow. Ray Wise gives an outstanding supporting performance as the emotionally frayed Dan Hollenbeck, a CBS newscaster and protégé of Murrow's who was accused of being a communist by a newspaper columnist and eventually committed suicide.
Frank Langella is properly dyspeptic as CBS boss William Paley, whose backing of journalistic freedom in his news department proved to have significant limits when Murrow went after McCarthy. Clooney casts himself as Murrow's producer, Fred Friendly, and does a decent job of playing down Friendly's famed aggressiveness, instead sharing his many scenes generously with the other players. Downey, Jr., Clarkson and a pudgy Jeff Daniels are put to dubious use playing other characters who were apparently important at CBS news at the time but are not written well into this screenplay (prepared by Clooney and Grant Heslov).
The film is on target, resonating keenly with our times. Murrow remarks early on, when he goes after McCarthy, that dissent should not be mistaken for disloyalty in a free society. Shades of all those post-9/11 debates. Not since the McCarthy era have civil liberties been as broadly threatened as they now are by the U.S.A. Patriot Act, military prisons and tribunals, and other restrictions put in place in the name of security against terrorism. Clooney, a liberal activist and the son of a television newscaster, slugs away at these issues: his film has been criticized for being overbearing in this regard, though I did not feel preached to.
"Good Night" also offers an important critique of television itself, by way of a prophetic vision that Murrow offered in a 1958 speech to news broadcasters, recreated scenes from which are shown at the beginning and end to frame this film. He said then that TV seemed to be approaching a crossroads, a conflict between its role in public education versus shallow entertainment. The bruises left after his falling out with Paley over the McCarthy programs obviously had not healed. Murrow chided network bigwigs for sitting complacently while the medium is "being used to detract, delude, amuse and insulate us." Two years later he was out of TV altogether, working as chief of the USIA, having been appointed by John Kennedy.
Forty seven years on, Murrow's prophesies about television have for the most part come true. Today television and radio are corrupted by a legion of shrill, bombastic cheerleaders for the right, while our more dispassionate, serious media journalists (print and TV) have frequently seemed either craven or muzzled in not pursuing egregious problems brought on by the Executive branch and Congress.
The only downside to the film, apart from the acting talents wasted here and there, is its highly focused, clichéd Hollywood emphasis on the "big showdown" between the good guys and the bad guys. It's a reductionistic, somewhat dumbed down account. Phillip Lopate, writing in "Film Comment," recently observed that "...Clooney's smug recasting of Cold War issues as a simple matter of decency versus intimidation fudges the film's politics. We never do learn whether Murrow was a member of a Communist front organization involving international education in the Thirties, as McCarthy claimed...To what degree was Murrow's 'taking sides' dictated by his own personal politics?...What does (Clooney) make of the influence of Stalinist Russia on the American Left at that time, and whether it held any possible danger or was entirely illusory?" Say this for the good guy - bad guy formula: it does get the juices flowing. I was spellbound watching this film. And we do need to be reminded of the truths told here, which hit harder in a two hour movie if not too freighted with nuance.
Bertolt Brecht famously said, "Pity the country that needs heroes." He meant, of course, that a yearning for great leaders - past or future - is all too often a sure sign of a nation foundering in a current leadership vacuum. Pity the media that need heroes, as well. It is apposite that Clooney at this moment offers his reflection on Murrow, surely a media hero for all times. My rating: 8.5/10 (A-) (Seen on 10/16/05). If you'd like to read more of my reviews, send me a message for directions to my websites.