Clooney proves to be a very smart director and Strathairn (how come I never heard of him before) plays with great skill the role of Murrow, the man who dealt with, almost on his own, the craze around the hunt for the Communists lead by the then US Senator McCarthy (Allen Ginsberg describes masterfully those times’ obsession with the Red Scare in his sarcastic America). The movie I saw yesterday has chances for quite some of this year’s Oscars (and before that, for some of the Golden Globes). The film critics on Rottentomatoes.com give the movie a well deserved 94% fresh rating. Believe me, you don’t want to miss this movie.
The beginning of the excellent review of the movie in The New York Times reads (it’s accessible entirely here once you make a free acount with them):
SHOT in a black-and-white palette of cigarette smoke, hair tonic, dark suits and pale button-down shirts, “Good Night, and Good Luck” plunges into a half-forgotten world in which television was new, the cold war was at its peak, and the Surgeon General’s report on the dangers of tobacco was still a decade in the future. Though it is a meticulously detailed reconstruction of an era, the film, directed by George Clooney from a script he wrote with Grant Heslov, is concerned with more than nostalgia.
Burnishing the legend of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS newsman who in the 1940’s and 50’s established a standard of journalistic integrity his profession has scrambled to live up to ever since, “Good Night, and Good Luck” is a passionate, thoughtful essay on power, truth-telling and responsibility. It opens the New York Film Festival tonight and will be released nationally on Oct. 7. The title evokes Murrow’s trademark sign-off, and I can best sum up my own response by recalling the name of his flagship program: See it now.
Murrow also had a memorable speech (excellently placed by Clooney in the movie as the present-time of the story) at the RTNDA Convention from Chicago, October 15. Retain at least his famous paragraph about what should be the role of the television and what should be the responsibility of the TV producers:
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. There is a great and perhaps decisive battle to be fought against ignorance, intolerance and indifference. This weapon of television could be useful.
