Screen scene

“Good Night, and Good Luck.” Directed by George
Clooney Warner Independent Pictures

With good reason, most movie titles don’t end in periods.
Since titles aim to entice viewers before they sit down and watch
the film, a nudge seems more applicable than a declaration, and so
question marks take over for periods. The title of George
Clooney’s extraordinary “Good Night, and Good
Luck.” has a period at the end of it. The little dot implies
that the movie is over before it begins, and that you should
already know what to take away from the experience. But a quick
glance at the words that precede the grammatical tool suggests
quite the opposite; if the title declares to say goodbye and wish
its viewers luck, there must be something to worry about beyond the
scope of the film. That is, of course, the case. The film, for
those who don’t recognize the subject by the title, revolves
around legendary CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow’s famous
on-air battle with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Murrow’s reports,
which always concluded with the sentence that titles the film, were
extremely controversial at the time, but were also extremely
influential in bringing McCarthy down. The always-underrated David
Strathairn plays Murrow with such eloquent integrity that
you’d swear the script was too romanticized for its own good,
except for the fact that all of Murrow’s on-air lines were
lifted directly from tapes of his newscasts. In the era before the
high-speed chase, when news departments weren’t competing
against the 24-hour cable news channels, network stations assumed
they would lose money on their news outlets. And as long as
you’re in the red, the thinking went, you may as well be
right. That was also the thinking that went into the making of the
film, which is for the most part Clooney’s personal project.
Clooney directed it in a beautiful black-and-white that makes you
want to smoke by the closing credits; stars in it as Murrow’s
producer, Fred Friendly; and co-wrote the screenplay with Grant
Heslov. In fact, the writing may be Clooney’s greatest
achievement, as it combines Murrow’s real telecasts and
McCarthy’s real speeches with a witty and well-researched
look behind the scenes at CBS at the time. The result is a film
that closely examines the role of the media in criticizing the
government, and concludes that good can certainly come of it, as
long as the press doesn’t consider economics its No. 1
priority. The inherent problems that go along with having a timid
media sound all too familiar, and Clooney wants them to.
Unfortunately, Murrow has said his last good night, and now we need
his luck all the more. ““ Jake Tracer