Good Night, and Good Luck

Strangely, it turns out that George Clooney is an excellent director. His first feature was the fabulous Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, but I thought that was a fluke. I mean, he’s George Clooney, you know? But with Good Night, and Good Luck, he’s really proven himself. This is one of the tightest little films I’ve ever seen: It includes almost nothing extraneous, focusing with painful precision to produce a tense and perfectly paced intellectual thriller. The film follows legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow during the days of the McCarthy hearings, and shows Murrow’s small part in bringing McCarthy’s reign of evil to an end. But it doesn’t turn Murrow into a saint of integrity. Instead, Clooney shows that Murrow buckled under by signing a loyalty oath, and that he didn’t pile on McCarthy until there were already cracks in the crackpot’s armor. Still, Murrow’s story provides an excellent vantage point to watch the unraveling of McCarthy’s sick misuse of the communist scare. Actor David Strathairn really captures Murrow’s odd mannerisms, and Robert Downey Jr. is, as usual, amazing in a supporting role. The best performance, though, belongs to the underrated Ray Wise as newsman Don Hollenbeck, who was driven to suicide in part by the badgering of the right-wing smear machine. But mostly, this film belongs to the perfect direction, which uses a minimum of story, script and setting to produce maximum tension and effect. Definitely one of the year’s best.