A+ For Clooney's High School Paper

Good Night, and Good Luck

by james hirschfeld

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George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck is an impressively tight, purposive film that examines the importance of responsible media and citizenship. At its core, the film is motivated by an idealistic notion of the power of truth, which leaves it at once inspiring and tedious. Clooney's second directorial effort is like an A+ high school essay: it is compelling and earnest, but ultimately unadventurous. I recommend it to any politically concerned American—or anyone who wants to see George Clooney up fifteen pounds.

Good Night, and Good Luck re-enacts the tactical war that CBS news anchor Edward R. Murrow waged against Senator Joseph McCarthy on his late night show, "See It Now." The movie is set almost exclusively in CBS' New York headquarters, where Murrow, played with austere intelligence by David Strathairn, and his producer Fred Friendly (a pudgy Clooney) shuffle around smoking cigarettes and putting together serious news pieces. One day, discussing the weekly news with the earnest members of his production team, Murrow learns of Milo Radulovic, an army official who has been laid off without due process for suspicions of communist ties. Despite the political implications, Murrow is compelled to expose the injustice on his television show. With this editorial piece, Murrow begins his attack on the Red Scare mentality that is the movie's focus, while challenging the prescribed role of the news anchor. Murrow's efforts culminate in a head-on confrontation with Senator McCarthy himself.

McCarthy and other historic figures cameo through dexterous incorporation of archived footage. The rest of the movie's fine cast struggles to humanize characters that seem to exist only at the office. Frank Langella plays William Paley, Murrow's boss, as both a mentor and a menace. He supports Murrow tentatively until the end of the movie, when "See It Now" looses its sponsors and Paley banishes broadcasting's truth crusader to the television doldrums of Sunday afternoon. With this act, Paley becomes the sinister hand of commerce, favoring profit over the protection of truth. Stealing chaste kisses in the copy-room, Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. play a couple that must hide their marriage from CBS due to company policy. Ray Wise plays pinko news anchor Don Hollenbeck who, tormented by conservative critics, decides to put himself out of his misery. Additional appearances include Jeff Daniels and—surprisingly, with the magic of archived footage—Liberace, who offers a rare comedic flare as Murrow's talk show guest.

See It Now

In creating a movie about men who believe in the American ideals of liberty, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, Clooney dishes a fair helping of implied criticism. If nothing else, Good Night, and Good Luck urges us to consider our responsibilities as citizens and our demands of the media. Clooney underscores the lost idealism of Murrow's work by giving the film an aesthetic of truth. The tidy cinematography of Robert Elswit contributes to this effect. Shot in luminous black and white under the raking lights of CBS headquarters, the movie goes for an appearance of objectivity that reminds you of an operating table (or news print, or a binary moralism). The tight close-ups are so searching that they almost seem indecent. With his seamless interplay of archived footage, Clooney tries to incorporate the perceived power of truth into the structure of his movie.

Clooney's attention to period details—cigarette smoke, hair tonic, jargon and film reels—approaches fetish. Beyond a fanatical desire to capture how things were, he seems to be saying that this pre-computer world of touch, splicing film, holding cue cards and starching one's collar was somehow truer than our own.

Clooney last appeared as a historical character in Wolfgang Peterson's The Perfect Storm. Though ultimately a box office hit, Peterson's film was condemned by many for its romanticizing and even exploitative depictions of a character who had truly lived. Building Good Night, and Good Luck around recorded episodes of See It Now and other information from the CBS archives, Clooney and his co-writer, Grant Heslov, try to resist such indulgence.

While Clooney's aesthetic of truth creates impressive unity within his narrative structure, this Spartan loyalty to the true events that transpired on See It Now limit the emotional impact of his movie. All of the director's forays away from the documented battle between Murrow and McCarthy are half-hearted, awkward, and dry. He offers remarkably little insight into the psychologies of the characters he glorifies, making little emotional demand of the audience. The suicide of a main character hits us like a CBS news blurb and Clooney's half-hearted look at the marriage of Clarkson and Downey Jr. seems an awkward and forced attempt of which the actors are conscious.

Despite these limitations, Good Night, and Good Luck effectively confronts us with a piece of our history from which we may learn. In an interview with the Associated Press, Grant Henslov, Clooney's co-writer, spoke on the parallels between our own political environment and that portrayed in the film ("Then it was the threat of communism" he said, "now it's the threat of terrorism"). While Arthur Miller's The Crucible recalled our nation's 17th century witch hunts to criticize McCarthyism, Good Night, and Good Luck recalls McCarthyism to criticize our own paranoia to great effect.

Good Night, and Good Luck is an effective, internally consistent paean to the power of responsible citizenship within our democracy. If Clooney's insecurity as a filmmaker keeps his interpretations literal and his movie dry, his subject matter is important and he leads by example. Like the very best high school paper, he stays to the point, quotes from the text, and delivers it with concise and consistent style.

JAMES HIRSCHFELD B'09 gained 15 pounds for this article.

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