George Clooney directed and appears in Good Night, and Good Luck. I like George Clooney, the human being and the actor, but as a director, he is just alright, and it is easy to get swept up by his films because he can pack the cast with talented actors, including himself. His films also have high production values, a retro energy that recalls classic Hollywood and an earnest thoughtfulness that generally makes him appear to align with the right side of history. What his films lack is an ability to elicit an unexpected emotion from his viewers, an insight into a situation that we did not already bring or at least suspect before the film, a way of delving into human nature in an incisive, innovative way.
I waited to see Good Night, and Good Luck. at home and only when it became convenient, when it could be streamed. I decided to watch it recently because it was about to expire, and mom decided to join me because she was interested in the subject. It was marketed to be about Edward R. Murrow, who is played by David Strahairn, and his news broadcasts against Senator Joseph McCarthy. Clooney was trying to capture the energy of network news behind the scenes to convey how difficult it actually was to confront such a powerful person, but the film also serves as a criticism of television and journalism today that is unwilling to edify and seeks to entertain, which is kind of amusing considering that this film was probably funded in part by the Ocean’s Eleven franchise.
Good Night, and Good Luck. has an amazing ensemble cast. There is not one bad actor in the bunch, and everyone perfectly suits his part. Frank Langella plays the boss. Robert Knepper plays a bad guy. The most effervescent casting is pairing Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr., who looks so young in black and white, as a working married couple who hide their relationship because it is against CBS’ rules. If you can just have Tate Donovan and Reed Diamond milling around in the background and occasionally tossing out a line, I can understand why viewers were starstruck by this film.
I am a stickler for noticing how a narrative is actually structured, and I despised Good Night, and Good Luck. It starts with the How We Got Here narrative trope by devoting the bookends of this film to an award ceremony held in 1958 honoring Murrow to basically reassure us at the beginning of the film that (mostly) everyone weathered the storm well, but it really is a lecturing moment for the industry. Movies with historical subjects already have to deal with a lack of suspense, but by using this trope, it completely erases any possibility of feeling anxious though there was still room to it. Once the story leaps to the past, Clooney decides to use a scroll to inform the viewers of the background of the period. Um, it feels a little late in the game to provide background, but I would have allowed it if it was not followed by other annoying tools that pepper the narrative. Then initially we get titles indicating the date that are then dropped and inconsistently reappear. Either use dates or don’t, but once you use dates and clearly change locations and days pass, it can at least subconsciously make the viewer wonder if it is the same day when it clearly is not. Clooney ends up undermining his own narrative.
Clooney was trying to make Good Night, and Good Luck. into All the President’s Men for television journalism, but failed. The film is dominated by archived footage in the forefront, which made me actually wish that I was watching a documentary instead of a dramatic film. If this film was really supposed to make me feel what it was logistically like to fight McCarthy, and I need to see the commercial breaks and the footage that they saw, then I also needed shots of them getting the footage. Either restrict the location to the studio for the entire film or embrace the entire story and recreate everything. No matter how technically versatile you are, your black and white film will never match the black and white footage of the archived news features. Even though you miss the socializing scenes and the excellent confrontation between Knepper and Downey, it should have been restricted to the studio for the story to feel complete. Instead it fails at attempting to be comprehensive.
I recently watched Cold Case Hammarskjöld in which the director realized that he had no black women in his film so he used his narrative structure to remedy the problem. I have no idea if Clooney was similarly motivated in Good Night, and Good Luck., but randomly a black woman jazz singer and her band would either appear in the studio or at the bar to sing completely out of context and incidentally. If there was a casually dropped line that she was recording for a show or that there is also a record studio there and they found her because she was playing at a nearby bar, it would feel less inexplicable. In a rare moment of unanimity, mom and I agreed that we would have preferred if there was no black woman in the film than a random black woman that they seemed to keep around to just happen to express the feelings that they suppress in the prior scenes instead of, you know, listening to the radio or a record. Dianne Reeves, we don’t begrudge you a check, but for a film that is supposed to show how the sausage gets made, it is damned lacking in detail regarding why Reeves is there all the time when none of her music gets featured in the aired segments.
Good Night, and Good Luck. thinks that it is sufficient to intellectually understand why it is doing something instead of asking if it makes the story work. It did not work for me, and maybe I am a philistine—I know that I am in the minority because it was nominated for Academy Awards, but it is not good. The cast is amazing. It is technically proficient. It is honest. It is well intentioned. It is boring and wooden. Maybe it does not translate well to the small screen and on the big screen, it is easier to get seduced by the execution. Either way, it did not work for me.
Good Night, and Good Luck. suffers from lacking a human touch and being superficial. Clooney is dominated by creating a professional snappiness and smoothness that never lets up even in the private moments of despair. I understand that was endemic of the time, but it does not mean that the film cannot attempt to evoke strong feelings in its viewers. Classic Hollywood films involving journalists often had snappy dialogue and constant movement, but somehow as viewers, we were still invested in them as people. Even though people are getting fired, and there is one suicide, it feels theoretical, bloodless, not like death and destruction are breathing down their necks. Skip it.