Good Night, and Good Luck Release Date: October 7, 2005 Starring: David Strathairn, Rose Abdoo, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson Directed by: George Clooney, George Clooney
PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 10/6/05)
George Clooney’s second feature-directing effort, Good Night, and Good Luck, is the fact-based tale of hard-smoking, integrity-defining television journalist Edward R. Murrow’s on-air tussle with paranoid, power-abusing, Red-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953. Given Clooney’s apparent predilection for all things ’50s, one might expect him to gorge himself like a calico with a Hefty bag full of catnip on the subject matter and deliver an epic of sorts. Instead, Clooney, shooting in silvery black and white and making the daring move of having McCarthy play himself via vintage film and TV footage, delivers his story in an almost anecdotal mode. Along the way, he touches, almost always pointedly, on issues that are of Vital Importance Today, and hardly ever gets preachy about it. (Indeed, he’s kind of enjoyably shifty—in the clips wherein McCarthy hammers the ACLU, only a cave-dwelling hermit could miss the resemblance Clooney’s drawing between Tailgunner Joe and self-described “bloviating” cable news personality Bill “The ACLU Is the Most Dangerous Organization in the Country” O’Reilly.)
It’s the modesty of Clooney’s approach that puts the picture’s concerns across. Framing the tale between two ends of a cautionary speech Murrow delivers at a 1958 broadcasting industry dinner in his honor, Clooney presents the episode as a single, emblematic example of an approach to both news reporting and mass-media discourse that now seems irretrievably lost.
Not everything works; a subplot featuring Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson as secretly married coworkers doesn’t deliver much (although it is nice to see Downey playing an ordinary, functional adult), and the casting of perennial bundle of nerves Ray Wise in the role of CBS newscaster Don Hollenbeck will strike many seasoned moviegoers as a bit of a hand-tip. But when the movie’s at its smartest, it’s dazzlingly bright. Clooney—who also plays Murrow’s producer and partner-in-martini-dry-banter, Fred Friendly—and coscreenwriter Grant Heslov (who appears here as Don Hewitt) are particularly smart to paint Murrow as a bit of an enigma rather than make a plaster saint of him. And David Strathairn, playing Murrow, follows his writers’ lead beautifully, delivering a performance that’s all understatement on the surface and searing fire underneath.—Glenn Kenny
