Good Night, and Good Luck (2005)
George Clooney
Impression published on Sunday, 2010-05-09 | Film | 3 stars
Good Night, and Good Luck, directed and co-authored by George Clooney, is kind of like Madmen if Madmen wasn't a serial drama of theoretically unlimited length and if you were supposed to regard the show's protagonists as men who exulted in civic responsibility and spat upon personal ambition, rather than the other way around.
In Good Night, Clooney stages a stylized return to the days of gracious living--those heady days when a man wore polished wingtips, smoked asbestos-filtered cigarettes and drunk-drove a real American car made of real American steel by real American low-lifes--that is engaging, involving and just topical enough to be rousing without pandering.
The all black-and-white production opens with ur-Newsman Edward R Murrow in Chicago, delivering his famous "wires and lights" speech, and proceeds to spend about an hour and a half putting down a redacted version of Murrow's battle against Joe McCarthy's "Red Scare" that, very much in the style of the journalism it chronicles, uses the expansion and contraction of carefully selected moments of televised political speech to highlight the various rhetorical, civil and legal parallels between McCarthyism and its deformed, half-blood bastard, "The War on Terror".
It's a neat movie. And a fairly subtle one, given the fact that it's about political brinkmanship and sententious rhetoric. And it's got a fairly subdued Robert Downey Jr supporting the primaries as a relatively laconic foil for the audience, so even if you like nothing else about it, once you see this movie you'll at least have an example of one flick in which Bob D wasn't ruthlessly stealing every single scene out from under the rest of the cast.
