Review of Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) by Markb. — 24 Oct 2005

I don't know who first uttered the truism, "The more things change, the more they remain the same", but it's clear that George Clooney, the co-writer/co-star/director of this riveting account of CBS News during the Joseph McCarthy witch-hunts of the early 1950s, has clearly taken it to heart.

We may have 300 TV channels to choose from rather than 3, with most black-and-white programming restricted to Turner Classic Movies or TV Land, and if a broadcaster or commentator offends our political stance, all we need to do is push a button rather than walk across the living room to change the channel.

But as Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov repeatedly demonstrate, it was just as possible then as it is now for less than completely scrupulous, agenda-driven political figures to try to control the content and tone of news coverage by intimidating networks and sponsors.

Thank God newsmen Fred Friendly and Edward R. Murrow (an astonishing portrayal by David Straithairn, who expresses emotion with his two cigarette-holding fingers as vividly and eloquently as Gromit the dog does with his two eyebrows) refused to be intimidated, but what a shame that few of their present-day descendants have even come close to reaching their standards of ethics and courage.

Some liberal moviegoers (and in all probability conservative pit bull and McCarthy groupie Ann Coulter) may feel somewhat let down by Good Night's cool, cerebral approach to its subject, but its refusal to rely on easy scores or cheap shots is precisely what makes it work so well.

(It may even make some viewers extremely nostalgic for the days in which such antagonists as Murrow and McCarthy, as diametrically opposed as they were and as much was at stake for each of them, conducted their debate in such a relatively genteel fashion: when was the last time you clicked on any cable or radio news show and heard two people quoting Shakespeare to one another?) Those who have nitpicked Clooney for giving Murrow and CBS too much credit for McCarthy's downfall are missing the point: the movie tells the story of the McCarthy area AS IT AFFECTED CBS and is no more an overall view of Tail Gunner Joe's reign of terror than the movie Patton was a panoramic view of World War II.

I loved the early scenes of Murrow doing "Person-to-Person" celebrity interviews--a tradeoff for being allowed to do the hard news he was really interested in--because any accusations of Murrow being a knee-jerk liberal clearly fall by the wayside as we witness his clear disgust at being forced to promulgate the falsehood of entertainer Liberace's heterosexuality, even though Murrow knew that outing him would've destroyed his career; the look on Murrow's face clearly shows us that he prized the truth above any type of doctrine.

That's why I think Good Night's pivotal point--and the one that speaks most clearly to us today--deals with McCarthy's tarbrushing Murrow as a Communist sympathizer because of the latter's friendship with a Socialist author whom he disagreed with but still shared a mutual friendship and intellectual respect.

Watch this sequence and weep a little for what we've lost in the climate of our current political dialogue: how far is it from "If you don't support McCarthy's actions, you're at least a pinko" to "If you're not completely behind the War on Terror, the Iraq invasion and the USA Patriot Act, you're on the side of the terrorists"? Except that although Murrow's eventual victory turned out to be a Pyrrhic one at CBS, chances are that if he were around today, his show would've been dropped by CNN or CSNBC after only 13 weeks for not being sufficiently deferential to the Fox News-watching audiences that those networks are trying to scoop.