George Clooney's film on Edward R. Murrow's stand against McCarthy,
Good Night, and Good Luck, is still in limited release, and hasn't landed in Madison, Wisconsin yet. But our local progressive daily,
The Capital Times, got a special screening last night and offered free tickets to its readers. I couldn't pass up the chance, and now I can't pass up the chance to urge everyone to see this film as soon as it comes to your town.
My amateur review after the flip.
Capital Times editorial page editor John Nichols (author of
Dick: the Man Who Is President) started the evening with a little rah-rah speech reminding us that
The Capital Times had been editorializing against McCarthy for ten years before Murrow stood up to him and that in every case -- slavery, civil rights, VietNam, etc, etc -- history has judged the progressive position as the correct one. ("We have always been right, and we will always be right. No, wait, we will always be left," Nichols said.) It was a bit self-congratulatory, as liberals are wont to be, but I could forgive a bit of a commercial in exchange for the free tickets.
I was surprised by the crowd. I would guess that at least fifty percent of those in attendance were old enough to be alive and at least in their teens during the events depicted in the film. Another thirty or forty percent were middle-aged, and the rest were my age - early thirties.
The movie is set almost exclusively within CBS news studios, so there isn't much context. There's a lot of assumed knowledge, which is probably ok. The story practically jumps straight into the first showdown in October of 1953, when an Air Force colonel was deemed a security risk, tried and convicted without having seen the evidence against him, and forced out of the Air Force. Murrow dedicated an episode of See it Now to the case, much to the chagrin of the Air Force, CBS executives and Alcoa (the show's sponsor - Murrow and producer Fred Friendly had to pay $1,500 each to make up for the ads Alcoa wouldn't pay for). While it didn't take on McCarthy directly, that show was a big deal. But there wasn't much build-up to it in the film, not much context, so while the nervous energy among the news crew was nicely portrayed, I didn't feel it.
But I figured out afterward that that was probably intentional, and probably ok, because by the time we got to March and April of 1954, when Murrow and McCarthy went head-to-head, my heart was pounding.
The film protrays the ridiculous nature of the Red Scare rather starkly. Everyone involved is terribly nervous all the time, and even an absurdly tenuous connection to Communists -- if your ex-wife went to a meeting before you were even married to her, back before WW2, when the Soviets were our allies -- was cause for concern.
The film uses archival footage of McCarthy that makes him look like a stark raving moonbat, which he was. Murrow's insistence on referring to him as "the junior Senator from Wisconsin" is comically derisive.
The whole film is framed as a flashback from 1958, when Murrow gives a wonderful speech on the power of journalism, particularly television journalism. That gives us a little lecture at the beginning and end, which might feel a bit didactic, but the speech is one that Murrow actually gave and it left me, as a journalist, ready to jump up and give Murrow a standing ovation even as I felt totally inadequate to call myself a journalist.
The film might actually be a bit too enthusiastic about Murrow, as it compresses the pinacle moments of his stellar career into ninety minutes. But one can not underestimate Murrow's importance to all or journalism and our modern sense of the press as the fourth estate, and one comes away from the film foolishly wishing one - just one - of the current crop of TV talking heads would grow some cajones.
Which brings me to the most important part of the movie. McCarthy's speeches sound chillingly familiar and immediate. Which is the point, of course. When he says you're either with us or with the Communists, you can't help but think you've heard that recently. When McCarthy's rebuttal is nothing but lies about Murrow, it feels familiar. When Murrow says that America is not a place where people live in fear of being imprisoned without charges ... well, you know what I'm saying.
The film is shot in black and white, which gives it a nice air of authenticity ... not really, because obviously color existed back then, but it does feel like we're watching newsreel footage that was shot at the time. But more importantly, you're constantly reminded that McCarthy and, in his footsteps, Bush and friends, see the world in black and white. You're good or you're evil. You're with us, or you're against us.
Another thing that stood out was the protrayal of Murrow as one who would not rest on his laurels. He truly felt that he was just doing his job, and even when he was successful, he'd only celebrate with a shot of scotch before moving on because he had more work to do. His reverence was for telelvision journalism and the role it could play in our nation's civic discourse, not to himself or his news program. When Payley moves him to Sundays, he's not mad because it's a personal affront, but because fewer people will hear the truth.
Because of the film's understated nature -- all indoors with no special effects and quiet, subtle performances -- I'm not sure it'll get much in the way of awards, though a few of the performances deserve Oscar consideration. Ray Wise as news anchor and Murrow admirer Don Hollenbeck is particularly good, and David Strathairn is dead-on as Murrow. Frank Lagella as CBS president Bill Payley portrays perfectly the impossibly fine line he has to walk between supporting his journalists and keeping the company in the black.
If there's a beef with the movie, it is that lack of context I mentioned before. It jumps right from October 1953 to March 1954, and assumes that you know that's about when McCarthy lost all touch with reality and things got really bad. It also kind of makes it seem like it was one critic that irked Don Hollenbeck and only hints at Hollenbeck's personal demons, of which he had many. It makes Murrow's other show, Person to Person, look like insipid entertainment, even though it was more than that in reality. And it doesn't follow up on the fact the Payley's "punishment" of Murrow - moving him to an hour-long show on Sunday afternoon - would ultimately prove to be the salvation of CBS news and spawn the rash of hour-long news magazines we have today.
But after all, this is a film about one series of events that happened in one network news studio, so confining the story to those events and that studio (and even some of the moderately humorous office politics) works in the end.
So. To sum up. Go see this movie. And then watch the network news or CNN or MSNBC and see how much you wish Murrow was still alive.