Good Night, and Good Luck

The one thing you can say about Clooney is that he’s pretty manly ( a term with new resonances thanks to the comic strip Boondocks). I mean women just fall at his feet. The Academy Awards showcast was full of references to his manliness, and his handsome chin acts like some kind of cosmic geosexual magnet. And he’s not just a pretty face, not just a man unafraid to carry a handbag if that’s what he needs to do. No, he’s spread his wings as a director, and picked up a fair amount of praise for his effort in directing Good Night, and Good Luck. The show, shot in pristine black and white, evokes the nineteen fifties and the war of words between CBS journalist broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, and Senator Joe McCarthy, then in his most rabid, anti commo, anti red Committee hunting phase. David Strathairn is very solid and convincing as Murrow, though you do have to worry about his ongoing health, given the amount of cigarettes he had to consume to evoke the nicotine saturated world of network television in the fifties. In fact Clooney makes great play with this – Murrow used to perform with a cigarette in hand, as well as doing pitches for the product on CBS, along with the commercials that saturated the airwaves in those days (though IMDb tells us that the ad featured in the show was in fact a cheat from a later time). Anyway you get a lot of nostalgia for smoke wafting through the air in ways that have disappeared from movies today, along with the smell of ephysemia. Clooney gives himself a role in the show as Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly, but he’s not so comfortable or suited to the role. Maybe it’s because these days he’s a bit of a celebrity, and an Ocean’s 12 kind of laid back, yeechy star that it makes it a bit hard for him to pretend he’s a low key tough and hardened CBS television producer. He suffers a little bit from what might be called the Kevin Costner factor, after that fading ham hung around in Thirteen Days like a bad, irrelevant and fictionalised smell, while the Kennedys went about the real business of the Cuban missle crisis. Senator McCarthy is represented by himself, through committee testimony and newsreel footage, and his ugly side is shown full on as he harasses a black working class woman and anybody else he thinks might have had a pink streak. You will find some people still prepared to defend McCarthy and his Spanish Inquisition ways, usually of a hard nosed Republican kind, but then the these interstellar ratbags are so far right they still think Richard Nixon was some kind of soft liberal for getting it on with China. However the extensive use of real footage does often raise the impression that the show is more dramatised documentary than actual drama. We’re given a bit of exposition that etches in Morrow’s early career, but it’s mainly by way of talk. We don’t get the real person (some would argue you never get that in the artificial world of television personalities), but instead we’re offered a rather manicured image of a thought provoking, always fair and committed investigative journalist, battling a mad politician and his cohorts, while confronting internal pressure from CBS, who just want the fuss to go away so they can get on with selling soap powder. His matinee looks long gone, Frank Langella now does a sturdy line in character studies and his work is as usual solid, as the half way decent, half way sell out CBS exec William Paley, who’s worried about all the politics ruining the bottom line. Langella makes a good foil for Strathairn in a couple of key scenes, which eventually sees Murrow and his show bumped to a Sunday afternoon slot. The nagging question remains however whether this shouldn’t have been the kind of show done more as an exercise in history – say a lot of real footage, with Straithairn just doing his schitck as a way of showing other sides of Murrow. It sort of heads that way a lot of the time, but also allows for a few detours. There are a couple of sub-plots that don’t work very well as drama – one concerns a man with a shadowy socialist past who ends up killing himself, and another plays around with a little remembered example of fifties sexism, whereby a husband and wife team are told one must resign from the network because it doesn’t employ married couples (the marriage having been kept secret from CBS). The conventional movie structuring – that’s what it feels like, even if someone writes in to tell me it all really happened – is upstaged by the sheer reality of the stock footage examples of McCarthy at work and which inevitably provide the most potent drama. As sometimes happens, drama can find itself all too easily done over by documentary footage, and by the sheer hideous wonder of reality. Ah well, with a bit of luck, we’ll all find ourselves soon back in the world of the fifties, with the picket fence, and the aprons and the American dream. The way the current crop of conservatives are heading we’ll soon see women revert to the role of the Stepford wives, and nothing wrong with that. Just don’t make us watch Nicole Kidman in the movie – an example of a hideous reality that defeats dramatic fantasy. Meantime, Good Night, and Good Luck (Morrow’s program ending farewell) reminds you just how weird the fifties were and why they inevitably led to the sixties (just as the war years inevitably led to a quest for societal dullness, so the decadent ways of the baby boomers led to a new wave of intelligent designers. If there's a meaning to this God only knows, but if the meaning is Enron, then welcome to the world of blackouts). Good Night, and Good Luck is a show worth seeing if you have any interest in the period or in McCarthyism, and be very afraid if your friends start talking about good old Joe. Clooney directs efficiently, if also in a relatively pedestrian way – understandably because of budget he keeps the action inside the CBS studios (and therefore inside a movie studio), with television and newsreel footage the main path to the outside world. It’s not the most well integrated or effective drama, but it has its quiet moments. For a real summary of black and white last century lunacy, you can’t of course go past Dr. Strangelove, but that’s another story …  

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