Good Night, and Good Luck: George Clooney Takes On History

David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow

(WARNER BROS.)

The clouds of cigarette smoke that curl up over David Strathairn’s Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck clue you in instantly that this movie is set in another time and another world. George Clooney’s film about the clash between the legendary CBS newsman and Senator Joseph McCarthy more than half a century ago might as well be placed in another century for all the name recognition it will have for the audiences that flocked to Star Wars and Batman. But they’re the ones who need it the most. They’re also the ones who may enjoy it the most, if they can be led to it.

Good Night, and Good Luck (the title is taken from Murrow’s famous sign-off on his network TV show) revives McCarthy not to trash him, surprisingly, but to let him have his say, in his own words, spoken by himself. The cast is impeccable. Robert Downey, Jr., Patricia Clarkson, and Jeff Daniels are all vivid in brief appearances. Frank Langella, more nuanced and more intriguing as a character actor than in his leading-man roles of 30-odd years ago, is the compromised CBS president, William Paley; Clooney, who put on perhaps 25 pounds, gives himself the juicy role of Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly; and, best of all, long-time supporting actor David Strathairn gets the role of his career as Murrow, and though he doesn’t really look or sound like the original, he does manage to suggest the steely intelligence and unblinking authority that Murrow conveyed. Strathairn is given a run for his money by, amazingly enough, Joseph McCarthy. Through the miracle of modern technology, the Red-baiting, demagogic senator from Wisconsin is represented, in all his terrifying banality, by his own computer-enhanced image. He is the best Senator McCarthy since James Gregory in the original The Manchurian Candidate, and I would not object if the Academy waived some rules to make McCarthy eligible for an Academy Award.

But then, he has an excellent director. Clooney’s first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002), flummoxed a great many critics with its mixture of whimsy and realism; could Clooney really, many critics asked rhetorically, be trying to tell us that the wildly implausible claims of the television game-show host Chuck Barris that he had once been a CIA hit man were valid? Clooney the director did not judge the subject of his film but simply gave Barris his head and let him tell his own story. That’s what he does in Good Night, and Good Luck, too.

Murrow confronts McCarthy, but you don’t feel the director standing over your shoulder telling you how to feel. That’s not the point of the film anyway; Clooney is out to fry bigger fish. Good Night, and Good Luck is an exhilarating wakeup call to a generation numbed by lazy journalism and hack partisan entertainers posing as journalists. The production is crisp, spare, and built to move at a swift pace, and the script, co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, is as tight as the classic Playhouse 90 productions that were an important part of television fare at the time Murrow was at the peak of his popularity. (In fact, the movie clocks in at barely more than 90 minutes.)

Increasingly in this new century audiences have expressed dissatisfaction with noisy, overstuffed action or fantasy films and snickering juvenile sex comedies. “Give us something for grownups,” they seem to be saying to the motion-picture industry in every television or magazine poll. Well, if you’re one of them, here’s your movie and your opportunity to show the industry that you want movies made by, for, and about adults. Don’t wait until Good Night, and Good Luck is released on DVD. Go now, and bring a teenager.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.