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February 05, 2006
Good Night and Good Luck
Good Night and Good Luck (Clooney, 2005, USA.) stars actor George Clooney in a role that reflects his fathers role in television in the 1950s. The film depicts the conflict between Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Senator Joe McCarthy. One of the things that makes this film interesting is that no attempt is made to depict McCarthy. Instead we have newsreel footage from 1954 of McCarthy's congressional hearings. In this way Clloney leaves us in nodoubt just how crazy McCarthy really was. Grainy black and white photography mirrors the newsreel footage as we follow the Murrow and his team, supported in a backhanded way by the managers - if not the shareholders - of CBS.
McCarthy's hearings are infamous for the way he accused everyone with even the remotest association with Communism with being an actual Communist activist. The parallels with Bush's America in the 2000s are pointed and fifty years after McCarthy we have not a war on Communism but a war on Islam. Clooney's timing of the film certainly hints at this association and takes the issue far more seriously than Woody Allen's 1976 poke at McCarthy in The Front.
The production takes a fly on the wall perspective and at times can be quite claustrophobic as it follows the crew through their research and presentation. There is absolutely no acknowledgement of the audience, except when Murrow talks to his television audience and his coolly detached mannerisms reinforce Clooney's chosen style. Social Values of the time are clearly depicted in the almost every characters smoking habits (cleverly satirised by showing a commercial with a 'doctor' recommending cigarettes) and the illicit relationship between a male and female couple who are crew members and told to choose who shall leave when things get tough and the show is scaled back. The Jazz singing interludes provide a perfect relief to the building tension.
Overall, performances are impeccable, and apart from a couple of very minor continuity glitches, so is the production itself.
10 stars.
Posted by andrewrenaut at February 5, 2006 03:20 PM