Good Night, and Good Luck
Saw Good Night, and Good Luck last weekend. For those who have been living under a rock — the movie is about a TV news host, Edward Murrow, who gets drawn into a conflict with Sen. McCarthy in 1954. McCarthy gets ridiculed on prime-time TV — more by his own words than by Murrow’s — and the decline of McCarthyism is assured. Perhaps the movie’s greatest achievement is the way it recreated the atmosphere of the early 50’s. The movie is shot in black and white. The faces — they look as if they belong on photographs from 50 years ago. Such faces do not exists today, fashion and evolution took care of them. How did they get modern actors to look that way? The make-up crew for the film must be commended. Similarly, the voices are not modern ones; Murrow’s clipped, raspy pronounciation really sounds like it belongs to a 1950’s star reporter. And everyone chain-smokes.
Acting is also good. Murrow, Fred Friendly, Murrow’s co-host Hollenbeck, and Murrow’s boss, all are extremely believable. McCarthy puts on an especially good performance, because he plays himself. All scenes with McCarthy are taken straight from archival tapes. I suppose the point was to show that the Wisconsin senator really was as crazy a demagogue as the film portrays him…
Good Night is, I believe, the second movie George Clooney directed. It shares a number of common touches with his previous work, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Both films are excellent. In both movies, Clooney acts, in a secondary but prominent role (Murrow’s colleague Fred Friendly in Good Night, Chuck Barris’s CIA handler in Chronicles). Both have unusually well-fitting music. And both carry an obvious political message. In Good Night, Milo Radulovich is fired from the US Air Force in 1954 for having a Communist father; the charges against Radulovich were sealed, and not shown to any jury or journalist. Not too different from today, where suspected terrorists are imprisoned for years on secret charges… However, the film is a great piece of art even if you ignore its (in my opinion, completely justified) politics.
Overall, very good movie. Go see it.