artflickchick.com

Sometimes work and extracurricular activities get in the way of blogging (though I wouldn’t necessarily call what I do here “blogging”), and I’m just happy that my break-taking happened to coincide with major technical disruptions from my Modblog server (hence the move) which would’ve made it either impossible or else a huge pain to upload anything anyway, allaying some of my self-imposed guilt for not writing regularly here. But now I feel behind and have the urge to catch up on movies I saw awhile ago before moving on to newer releases. What better way to start over again than with New York film festival opener Good Night, and Good Luck?

Admittedly, I’ve never been much of a Clooney acolyte (because I didn’t watch ER like everyone else used to?) though, empirically-speaking, I understand his charmingly caddish old-world appeal. Still, career choices immediately following his run on that TV series – ho-hum Hollywood roles in Batman and Robin and One Fine Day - seemed to confirm my suspicions that he was yawningly on his way to leading-man status (though I should give him credit for doing the vastly underrated From Dusk Till Dawn right off the bat). Then something interesting started happening. Rather than pursue more conventional star material in this throwaway blockbuster vein, he slowly began charting a different course for himself by teaming up with edgier, artier directors like Steven Soderbergh and the Coen Brothers. His directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, announced this influence in its visual dynamism – which feels like the beginner’s attempt it is in its occasionally forced overabundance - but foretold of better things to come.

In Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney starts making good. With beautiful cinematography incorporating long tracking shots and an impressive depth-of-field, the style this time feels organically integrated into the rhythm of the story, and captures with fluidity the freneticism of the television news studio. From the moment it begins, you can tell this won’t be the usual ego-stroking of an actor-turned-director. In most cases where stars direct themselves an air of pomposity permeates the affair (Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves, Mel Gibson in Braveheart). But, as Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly, Clooney refreshingly shoots himself in an oblique, self-effacing manner (so much so that you barely recognize him upon his first appearance) far different from the usual copious glorifying close-ups generally preferred in such projects. And for all the confetti being strewn around its release, Good Night, and Good Luck remains an enticingly small film. Rather than wax wide-ranging or long-windedly as you expect, the movie stays close to the bone in its depiction of an incendiary moment in American television history - when broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) began calling Senator Joseph McCarthy on his bullshit.

It’s this refined focus which makes Good Night unique, epic in its implications though modest in scope (though it does succumb to that damn narrative bookending device I hate). So, though I love Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, the subplot involving their secret marriage (not allowed under then-CBS rules) feels like a distraction, overly shrouded in mystery and irrelevant. At least Clooney doesn’t make the usual mistake of including a token portrait of a long-suffering and supportive wife – either Murrow’s or Friendly’s – an idealized role that lacks any dimensionalizing valence yet somehow always annoyingly ends in Academy Award nominations for the actresses, a reward for weeping prettily while standing by their men (i.e., Kathleen Quinlan in Apollo 13, Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind). Force-fed these un-nuanced domestic descriptions so often in biographical renderings of larger-than-life figures, it comes as a relief when Clooney opts to stick solely to the newsroom.

That Good Night takes place in the 1950’s – a decade now synonymous with the retrograde – only makes the parallels to the modern political climate more chilling. It certainly feels as if we’re headed for a time-warp future that erases the cultural revolutions of the 60’s and returns us to that regressive period. Arthur Miller penned The Crucible in allegorical response to McCarthyist persecution and, following his lead, Clooney conjures the Red Scare in order to comment on the post-9/11 atmosphere of fear and knee-jerk judgments. Scarily, he doesn’t even have to draw explicit lines connecting then and now because Murrow’s speeches seem squarely aimed at the heated present, a sense Clooney compounds by setting up the camera close and conforontational so that Strathairn delivers his reports not just to the audience back then but directly, urgently, to us. Energizing in its clear-eyed description, Good Night, and Good Luck contains plenty of rousing rah-rah moments (if you’re a liberal, that is) which had me wanting to jump out of my seat and clap from Murrow’s first takedown to final signoff.

And while many of his words continue to ring as eerily prescient, certain anachronisms highlight the ways in which the world has changed since then, for both good and ill. Murrow, for instance, constantly smokes cigarettes during his broadcasts, something which now seems unthinkable. And, sadly, his sincerest sentiment that television be used as a tool for the social good seems quaint, a far away notion in an era of ratings-obsessed networks run rampant with reality shows, franchised law procedurals, and endless reruns of the same sitcoms, to say nothing of news shows themselves, as trashily sensationalistic as anything else on the boob tube these days.

- km