A good historical or biographical film rarely turns out to be a masterpiece; Good Night, and Good Luck proves the point, failing to rise above the level of a good, interesting documentary.
The comparison to a documentary is apt because so much of Good Night is archival footage from the Murrow television program on which the story is based. The camera rarely leaves the set of Murrow’s program See It Now, except to follow the reporters who are the main characters to a bar for a celebratory scotch. Essentially, the program is a recap of the events surrounding Murrow’s decision to publicly abandon the journalist’s credo of impartiality and to take a stand on a controversial issue. The move would prove portentous for broadcast journalism.
The occasion for this decision is a news story that almost passes unnoticed: an Air Force lieutenant is summarily discharged because his father reportedly reads a subversive Serbian newspaper. Murrow takes on the topic as a way of taking on Joseph McCarthy, the then-powerful Senator investigating Americans from all walks of life for Communist ties. Eventually, Murrow faces McCarthy personally, and McCarthy’s personal attacks on Murrow lead to his eventual downfall.
Like a good documentary, Good Night is historically accurate and thought-provoking. What strikes the viewer is how little has changed in forty years, and it leads one to wonder if anything has changed in a hundred years, other than clothing styles and people’s taste in music.
A sub-plot involves CBS news anchor Don Hollenbeck, who commits suicide after being repeatedly attacked in print by Hearst columnist Jack O’Brian, a conservative supporter of McCarthy. One of O’Brian’s columns attacking Hollenbeck is read on screen by an actor, and presuming the article is actually an O’Brian piece, it is as vicious and scurrilous as anything written by Ann Coulter. Among other things, O’Brian accuses Hollenbeck of reporting the news from a “slanted” leftist perspective and makes accusations about Hollenbeck’s association with the communist party in the nineteen-thirties.
Unfortunately, much of this film is merely reportage of the variety described above: e.g., the actors assemble in a bar to read the newspaper reviews of last night’s program, and read them, they do. Clooney seems not to have learned the rule that good fiction writers know by heart: show, don’t tell. Good Night is a story told to us by gifted actors. It’s a good film worth seeing once, but probably no more.
However, seeing it once provides the viewer some valuable perspective on our own era. The news media is under daily assault from the modern day equivalent of Joe McCarthy and Jack O’Brien. Instead of communists, the right has a new bogeyman, “liberals,” a term used interchangeably with Socialist, Communist, and Democrat; and the right routinely refers to liberals as terrorist sympathizers.
McCarthy’s charge that Democrats and communist sympathizers give aid and comfort to “the enemy,” is echoed in charges from Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and others, that liberals give aid and comfort to the enemy with their persistent criticisms of the President and his foreign policy.
Thus what is most terribly striking about the similarities between 1954 and 2006 is how “McCarthyism,” defined as using unfair and unfounded allegations of subversive activities or beliefs in order to suppress dissent, has become so commonplace in our society. The daily hammering of liberals in the new Hearst media, as represented by Clear Channel Communications, occurs without so much as a whimper of objection among the majority of Americans and their legislators. And unfortunately for us, there are no Ed Murrows to prick the windbags of talk radio.
The travesty of our day is that there is no effective voice of the opposition in this country. That ought to trouble even the most complacent conservative among us. Without effective opposition, even the best government can come to believe the delusion of its own infallibility.
