Man of Honour

Burning with rage: Television newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) in Good Night, And Good Luck. Photo courtesy Warner Independent Films.

One of the few good things to come out of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy was the sense, temporary or not, that the American news media had recovered some of the capability and relevance that it had long been missing. When Anderson Cooper and Brian Williams reported on the Bush administration’s sluggish response to the crisis, their courage (and, in Williams’s case, stentorian delivery) reminded some commentators of the most distinguished figure in all of American broadcasting: the late Edward R. Murrow.

Cooper and Williams might look to George Clooney’s strange and stirring Good Night, and Good Luck for further spine-strengthening inspiration. The film reconstructs one of the more illustrious passages in Murrow’s biography: his battle against Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose relentless, destructive campaign to root out communism violated the newsman’s sense of justice and decency. But Clooney’s not interested in a simple history lesson. Instead, he has reduced this moment to its purest, most pointed essence; in the process, he’s created a parable for our own politically fraught times.

The skirmish between Murrow and McCarthy was not so much mano a mano as visage a visage. Those famous faces — creased, grave, ashen — never glimpsed each other in a room; rather, their war of words was played out on TV screens across North America. Each man stared down the barrel of a cathode-ray tube.

Good Night, and Good Luck is bracketed by a quietly passionate speech given by Murrow (David Strathairn) at a journalism awards ceremony in 1958. In it, he warns of the dangers of vapid television and a complacent viewing public, a sentiment as relevant today as it was then. Throughout the rest of this concise film (93 minutes), Murrow and his staff, led by producer Fred Friendly (a paunchy Clooney), use their pulpit, the CBS show See it Now, to rail against the increasingly insidious McCarthy.

In his most aggressive attack, Murrow uses clips from McCarthy’s own speeches and TV appearances — a montage of monstrosity — to illustrate the clear and present danger the senator from Wisconsin poses to civil liberties. Murrow offers McCarthy the opportunity to respond on the program. The senator initially proposes that William F. Buckley appear in his stead; when Friendly demurs, McCarthy makes a live-to-air rebuttal, dredging up Murrow’s own alleged connections with the Communist Party. Murrow possesses the elocution and vocabulary of Cicero; McCarthy only sneers. But McCarthy also has Madison Avenue in his back pocket — the CBS empire is built on revenues from sponsors made jittery by Murrow’s grandstanding.

Couch session: Murrow and television producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney). Photo courtesy Warner Independent Films.

Murrow is brought to life by Strathairn, long a character actor of some repute, but not the go-to guy to anchor a film. (He’s best known perhaps for roles in the John Sayles films Eight Men Out and Passion Fish.) He’s perfect for the role of Murrow, however. Even if his physical appearance and demeanour aren’t quite exact (the late newsman was beefier and a bit less solemn), he masterfully captures a man contorted, nearly crushed, by the weight of duty. His Murrow rarely smiles, and is, in keeping with the spirit of the film, thoroughly single-minded. And when he signs off with the words expressed in the film’s title, he routinely lowers his head as if aware of the insufficiency of the sentiment.

McCarthy, on the other hand, is not played by an actor. We see him only on kinescope and in archival footage, extended passages in which the senator’s frothing hatred is barely held in check; he is a zombie reanimated by technology. The always-riveting Frank Langella plays CBS president William Paley like a Don Corleone impatient to get to his box at the Met — suave, deceptively impassive, lethal.

This is clearly a personal film for Clooney. Himself the son of a Cincinnati newsman, the actor has enjoyed his own jousts with the paparazzi and, more importantly, with Fox bloodhound Bill O’Reilly. Clooney’s directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, was an amusing if forgettable diversion, but Good Night, and Good Luck, from its first black-and-white frame, insists on its own importance. Clooney the director is much less eager to please than Clooney the actor. He reduces his own role to that of second fiddle, but he also reduces everything else, including viewing pleasure. Despite a constantly roving camera, the film feels inert, almost stage-bound. There is no score; scenes are punctuated by brief vocal performances by Dianne Reeves (singing, it would seem, in an adjacent sound studio). These songs are divorced from the main action, alluding to the film’s events in an almost Brechtian fashion.

The plot itself is minimal, tightly focused. All these men do is work or talk about their work, and we learn nothing about them aside from their work. Exteriors are hardly glimpsed, and, if they are, the world outside CBS’s windows is perpetually dark.

The implication is that capturing the bravery of a Murrow requires a commensurate visual bravery. This may not be pleasurable, but it is wholly admirable. Good Night, and Good Luck is more essay than biopic, an experiment that might even charm Jean-Luc Godard. The film is so phlegmatic that even when a kind of victory is reached, there is no scene of fist-pumping, hair-raising jubilation. All the viewer feels is a meagre kind of relief, a small shift in the film’s emotional hydraulics, and even that is undercut by another scene in which Paley berates Murrow.

This is Clooney’s melancholic message: that Murrow’s vigilance attained a brief respite from the witch-hunt mentality that threatens America always. The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay — McCarthyism, by any other name, smells just as foul.

Good Night, and Good Luck opens Oct. 28 in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver, and Nov. 4 across Canada.

Jason McBride is Toronto-based writer and editor.