Film Review

The longer I live here in America, the more the place befuddles me. There is a certain sheen and veneer to american cultural life that hides a wealth of troubling history. Of course, all nations have their history, those told and untold--their complex webs of duplicity, will to power, and dark secrets. The underbelly of American optimism, manifest destiny, and "have a nice day," is it's sense of impending doom, its fascination with the apocalyptic. This is a culture whose pop life is full of alien invasion and the need to repel those who wish the country ill. It is this element which seems again and again to produce such a rich vein of fear, paranoia, and anger, which rises to the surface throughout its short history.

Stretching back to its earliest beginnings Americans have demonstrated their perfection of the art of the witch hunt, be it with Puritan frenzy in Salem, or the Council on Un-American activities in the 1950s. Goodnight, Good luck is George Clooney's latest film and it investigates that giddy time in American social life when Senator Joseph McCarthy virtually single-handedly led a crusade against 'communists.' It is hard to imagine how threatened Americans are (should I say were?!) by the idea of Communism. Growing up in a working-class British family left wing politics was a staple. I will never forget the day my friend Joe Jacques dad gave me what is still one of my all time favourite books, The Ragged-trousered Philanthropist, Robert Tressel's opus about capitalism and the working class, it shaped my view of politics so deeply.

Goodnight, Good Luck was journalist Edward R. Murrow's signature sign off on his television show, and Murrow is the topic of Clooney's film. Or rather, Murrow versus McCarthy. The film centres on a very short period of time in the 1950s when paranoia and the witch hunt spirit had drawn America into a feeding frenzy, and much of the country, and many in the entertainment industry particularly, lived in fear of having their lives and livelihoods destroyed by one man's obsession with the menace of communism. Murrow, armed with a deep conviction that the un-American activity that needed to be addresses was McCarthy's, gamely put his career on the line and set out to challenge the Wisconsin Senator's crusade. The film is compelling on a number of levels.

It is shot in black and white and one is immediately drawn into the sense of being in a different time and place, one in which men wear suits with crisp white shirts and every body smokes--and I mean everybody, you can almost smell the smoke coming off the screen. There are musical interludes that bridge major scenes in the film and which also help the sense of period and context. There is an almost claustrophobic use of camera angle. CBS may have been a major television network even in the 1950s, but back then everything was done in small environments--Murrow's producer, Fred Friendly, literally lay beneath the Murrow's television desk and tapped the newsman's knee to cue him to camera. All of this combines to give the viewer a sense of the way this period of history gripped the nation and put a virtual stranglehold on its ideals. Murrow was an unlikely activist on some levels and his life was a strange mix of intense and high-idealed journalism coupled with frothy celebrity-driven shows. A highlight of the film is a clip of Murrow discussing future marriage plans with a very-gay-even-back-then Liberace.

Murrow's bold challenge to McCarthy eventually breeches the wall and breaks the wave of paranoia created by the Senator and his committee. But of course we know that. Clooney is not telling us a story we don't know, but he is reminding us of the role of government and the real values America should stand for. Murrow is not a supporter of communism, he is incensed by the tactics and the disregard of what he viewed as every person's right to be treated with dignity and respect, to be challenged by the truth and not hearsay and gossip. "Dissent is not disloyalty," is just one of the lines from the film which help to connect it with some of the issues in today's political climate.

The film ends with newsreel footage from one of America's presidents speaking about habeus corpus, and everyones right to freedom and security--a mouthful of words in these days of Guantanamo Bay etc. The beauty of this film is that it doesn't preach, instead it invites us to make connections and consider what it truly means to be 'un-american.'

Murrow made a speech about the role of television at a dinner held in his honour in 1958, a few years after the events that changed his life. In it he declared that if television was only about entertaining, amusing, and ultmiately insulating us from the real issues of life, we would be the worse for it, and he challenged televison executives to interrupt programming occasionally to address issues of cultural, moral, and political import to the nation. I am not sure his words were heeded, but they ought to be.