It has been clear for some time now that George Clooney had ambitions beyond being TV’s sexiest, best-loved doctor — or even beyond being the new Cary Grant, though he took a stab at that with the Coen brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty. Not only has he stretched himself as an actor (playing, for instance, the central role in the remake of the heady science fiction classic Solaris, and taking serious parts such as a CIA agent in the upcoming Syriana), but he’s doing some directing work as well.
It seems that Clooney’s role in Out of Sight was a bit of a turning point. That adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel (and Leonard usually adapts well) was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the maverick who began his career with Sex, Lies and Videotape before vanishing from the Hollywood radar for a bit. Out of Sight gave Clooney and Soderbergh a new career boost. They established a production company together to develop projects they liked, and have already done well out of Ocean’s Eleven and its sequel.
Soderbergh co-produced Good Night, and Good Luck, but Clooney directs. He also has a medium-sized role as a television producer — a quiet but essential role backing up David Strathairn as Ed Murrow, the TV journalist who took on senator Joseph McCarthy in the midst of the senator’s witch-hunt for com-munists in the 1950s.
The parallels with today’s United States, and its war-driven president promulgating repressive legislation aimed at any dissent, are obvious. Such resonances are surely part of Clooney’s (and co-scriptwriter Grant Heslov’s) project, but they make their point simply by telling the Murrow story. They do not bang their drums too hard.
Yes, the movie is framed by a speech Murrow gives at an awards dinner, in which he sets out his concerns about the way television is abdicating its responsibility to inform and enlighten and is, instead, dedicating itself to banal entertainment. The movie’s issues are set out early. But that concern, expressed half a century ago, seems quaint in the light of the ever more profound depths of banality to which television has since sunk. Survivor and Touched by an Angel were not yet even a twinkle in the eye of an ambitious producer.
Good Night, and Good Luck (the title comes from Murrow’s sign-off phrase) is shot in elegant, restrained black and white, and it does a number of things very well. It shows the backroom machinery of a television newsroom and station, and limns deftly the characters involved — those played by Robert Downey Jnr and Patricia Clarkson, in particular, are intriguing, and face an interesting dilemma. It gives one a clear sense of the politics of the time and the difficulty — as well as the necessity — of finding an appropriate response to them. In that respect, Good Night, and Good Luck feels very contemporary indeed.