Good Night, and Good Luck

What’s the Story?

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK is George Clooney's admiring portrait of Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn). Murrow first appears in 1958 accepting an award from the Radio-Television News Directors Association for his remarkable work as a journalist, then cuts back to 1953, just as Murrow's measured, sustained response to McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee is getting underway. Murrow and See It Now producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) decide to air a story on a Navy pilot dismissed following false accusations by McCarthy that he's a security risk. The show, and Murrow's introduction and closing thoughts, catch McCarthy's attention, and CBS president William Paley (Frank Langella) calls him into his office and arranges a punishment: fewer documentary/opinion broadcasts and more episodes of Person to Person, the mostly celebrity interview program that Murrow detested. The film takes up a specific moment in Murrow's career -- his public battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy -- it sets up an opposition between righteousness and fear. But it also shows the political and cultural contexts for this opposition.

Is It Any Good?

Elegant, deft, focused, and shot in exquisite black and white, the film is partly reverential, partly probing. As Murrow reads from his award acceptance speech, you realize that this work is not only investigative or even resistant to the powers that be, but gorgeously written. If you come away from Good Night and Good Luck with nothing else, you will come away with renewed appreciation for luminous prose.

Selected images from the HUAC hearings are often riveting, as when McCarthy accuses Annie Lee Moss of being a communist, a charge so patently baseless that a committee member finally demanded that McCarthy and lawyer Roy Cohn produce proof of the charges. More artificial and so more provocative are inserts of jazz singer Dianne Reeves; apparently recording in a CBS studio some standards that comment on the action. While artists -- and here, no coincidence, a black woman artist -- might have and even pronounce insight into the bluesy world we all inhabit, the folks in the upper floor offices don't hear it.