Good Night, and Good Luck (you're gonna need it)

The new job is really wearing me out. I've recently been devoting more time to Knights of the Old Republic II than I have to current affairs (much to my shame, so close to an election). But keeping up I have been, and I promise an election-related post before the election comes. And tomorrow, we'll talk about that wacky Gordon Brown! This has to be the worst non-military foreign relations move of the last hundred years!

But for the moment, let's talk about something that hasn't qualified as "current affairs" since about 1957: the Joe McCarthy Communist hearings, coincidentally, the subject of George Clooney's second feature outing as a director.

Good Night and Good Luck (2005) is a tease of a film that begins with the impression that it will easily be the next All the President's Men. It chronicles CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow's journey throughout the fifties as he sought, and eventually managed to, investigate and expose the illegitimacy and falsehood surrounding the McCarthy witchhunts. With a cast led by David Strathairn (The Bourne Ultimatum, L.A. Confidential) as Murrow and a small army of recognizable and first-rate actors along for the ride in very minute capacities, my expectations were high.

On the acting side of things, I was not disappointed, and how could I be? David Strathairn is 1952 (and '53, and '54...). His performance is one that actually deserves the label "electrifying". A quiet, internal man who only speaks when he feels he has something worth saying, Strathairn's Murrow is a force and a delight to watch. His news crew includes Jeff Daniels (The Lookout), Reed Diamond (one of my favourite TV regulars, whose credits include Homicide: Life on the Street, The West Wing, The Shield, Stargate: SG1, and Journeyman), Robert Downey Jr., and Patricia Clarkson (more on them later), and is headed up by Frank Langella (Dave, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Masters of the Universe) as the station president. Along with about half a dozen other people who'll make you say "where do I know him/her from?", this is ensemble casting and acting at its finest.

As a film, though, I'm afraid I can't reccommend it. Good Night and Good Luck falls into the trap of relying too much on the facts its based on in order to tell its story. It starts out promising, with Murrow giving a speech as he's being honoured for his work, and flashes back to tell the story of his pursuit of McCarthy, and kind of trails off from there. It's a film with a beginning, but no formal middle or end. The facts unfold, in chronological and accurate order, but they don't create a storyline - this is one of the few films I've seen that has not one bit of ebb and flow, tension and release (the other one that springs to mind is also a based on history film with a stunning ensemble cast, All the Right Stuff). There's no movement, no sense of journey - things just happen, to the point where when Murrow et. al. finally hear that McCarthy's being investigated, there's not much sense of climax or triumph. Part of that lack of triumph is fitting to the story and Murrow's performance, but it goes past the bounds of refusing to sacrifice realism for plot. I recognize the struggle and the difficulty to pulling this off - even All the President's Men came very close to doing this.

Also hugely disappointing is Clooney's Downey Jr. and Clarkson tease. This pair of first-rate actors have a hiccup of a part as Joe and Shirley Wershba, a couple who worked in Murrow's newsroom and had to hide their marriage due to a rule that barred CBS employees from marrying other CBS employees. Their scenes are sparse, and completely disconnected from the rest of the film, and I have a feeling that their roles only went even that far because the Wershbas worked as consultants on the project. Whatever the case may be, being teased with such a fleeting glimpse of such a stunning pair was worse than not seeing them at all.

The film's black-and-white format also didn't fly. Clooney and crew didn't have a good handle on how to make a black-and-white picture look like, well, a classic black-and-white picture. Good Night and Good Luck looks like what it is - a contemporary film shot on B&W stock, with no sense of lighting, tone, etc. to suggest proper technique. It must be noted that this deficit of technique was corrected in Clooney's next classic-style project, The Good German, which looks and feels every inch the 40's-50's noir it gives tribute to.

Would I watch it again? A hard question. I want to watch David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow again, but not in this film.