Good Night, And Good Luck (2005)
By PaulWe must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
I posted my original review of Good Night, And Good Luck when it was in the theaters last year. Now that it’s out on DVD, I hoped you might permit me to climb on to my creaky old soap box for a moment.
It’s a bit of a fashion among some conservatives to attempt to rehabilitate the image of Senator Joseph McCarthy, to portray him as a misunderstood patriot brought low by the left wing media elite. To them, KGB files that confirm the not unsurprising fact that, yes, there were actually communists in America during the fifties somehow vindicate the Senator’s methods.
Speaking as someone who does, in fact, list to political starboard, this is as bad for conservatism as it is for history. Even if every target of McCarthy’s committee was as guilty as sin, that doesn’t mean his tactics of slander and innuendo were valid investigative techniques. The junior senator from Wisconsin was a crass opportunist who seized upon the country’s worst fears and used them for his own aggrandizement.
Conservatives cannot let themselves be so blinded by partisanship and ideology that they make excuses for the likes of Joe McCarthy.
Now that’s off my chest, back to the movie.
I still think highly of Good Night, And Good Luck, with its crisp documentary style and lovely black-and-white cinematography. I do, however, think that the subplot involving Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson), who secretly violated the CBS policy against married co-workers, was an unnecessary diversion that added very little. It helps that they were both likeable characters, but their story is hardly essential to the clash between Murrow and McCarthy.
I also enjoyed the film’s sense of wry irony, showing Edward R. Murrow, who died of lung cancer, being sponsored by Kent cigarettes. Also, older audiences must have gotten a chuckle out of Murrow asking Liberace if he would ever get married. Writer/Director George Clooney’s eye for such details served this picture well.
About the author:
Paul's cat has violent mood swings between ennui and apathy.
