Good Night, And Good Luck

The RT consensus for this film reads,

This is a passionate and concise civics lesson from the past, arriving with much political and cultural relevance to today.

That's true, and it's what I expected, but it's not the kind of review that's gonna get the Fog audience ("Civics lesson? Cultural relevance? Ew!"). So, what I want to talk about a little bit here is what I didn't expect.

The film is surprisingly tense and moving, even if you're familiar with the events it dramatizes, which I am. Clooney's script (co-written with Grant Heslov) resists the urge to have its characters embark on long soliloquies, and uses mostly their own, publically recorded words.

Everything else is suggested in performance.That's a tribute to the casting and the subtle performances Clooney got from his actors. David Strathairn in particular performs one of the most remarkable re-creations of a real person I've ever seen as Ed Murrow, but it's not a Rich Little-style impression.

Rather, it's a carefully assembled lesson in the art and craft of acting. Not a showy, "Oscar-bait" performance (think Jodie Foster in Nell), though IMO he deserves a nomination, but a disciplined, nuanced one that makes the audience come to him.

Similarly, Clooney is also to be commended for his low-key performance; this is no vanity project designed to show a movie star in the best light. He acts, as Fred Friendly reportedly acted, as Murrow's steady, supportive collaborator.

Another of the film's real achievements is that it reminds us of what a great writer Edward R. Murrow was; he almost deserves a co-screenwriting credit. And this invites us via inference to mourn the fact that we have no such men or women writing for the television news today.

I'm not speaking of political speechmaking, merely of writing, and it's a craft that Murrow practiced with the skill of Norman Corwin and maybe even of Sorkin. The film is a respectful tribute to him and if there is one thing I would like to see most as fallout? It is a new generation of journalists who know that we have had, and can and must have again, a better news media than we have today.