A Good Night, Indeed

George Clooney’s sophomore directorial effort—2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck—is pure entertainment. Sure, it’s couched in terms we all know: constant preachy-ness, actual news footage, pretentious black and white in the age of color, and an all-star liberal cast coming together to make a statement, but this is still a movie that entertains and means to.

Everyone seems to want to talk about the statement, which is important, granted. Remember George Clooney’s speech at the Oscars? He said something about the way entertainment needs to do more than simply entertain; it needs to educate by tackling the tough issues of the day. That’s what Good Night, and Good Luck does. It says something or other about the importance of the media to do more than kowtow to either the authorities or the public sentiment, which generally tow the same line, anyway. The media needs to report the news, but not simply objectively. Reporting means to dig deeper, to go behind what people say to actually investigate how or why people say it. I appreciate that kind of investigative journalism, but that’s not what makes this movie good.

As I have constantly said, issues don’t necessarily make for good movies, so let’s forget that this is an issue-movie. First of all, it doesn’t present itself as an issue movie. Yes, it’s about the fall of McCarthy, but it’s really about the characters. In fact, I would call this movie itself a bit of investigative journalism. Instead of simply describing what these characters did in order to help expose McCarthy, it tries to give us a glimpse of these characters at specific moments in time in order to make us understand how they could go about it in the first place.

What I appreciate about it is that it doesn’t try to present every aspect of each character. In fact, we only see two of the characters outside of work, and even that is unnecessary. The two characters in question, played by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, have to hide that they’re married, and I kept wondering why we needed to know this fact about these two characters who do nothing to advance the plot. But their marriage is the point because it shows us the time period we’re talking about. Whereas Clooney knows he’s dealing with an educated audience—he offers no introduction to the main character or McCarthy, after all—he wants to give us a glimpse into what real life was like in those days. We never leave the CBS offices at all, except to see how this couple who works there has to hide their own marriage. Sure, CBS may not censor its reporters, but it certainly isn’t a bastion of liberalism, either.

The kind of censorship the movie deals with, then, is the censorship of a period, a moment in time, and that message is much more powerful now than the simple message about the media. When Ann Coulter’s books Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Godless: the Church of Liberalism become bestsellers, we know something about keeping our mouths shut. Especially if one happens to be a Democrat and—gasp!—a Christian.

But I digress.

What makes Clooney’s work so entertaining is that it isn’t a bit pretentious. Sure, it’s an issue film, but it’s doing so in the guise of presenting fact. The facts take up less than 90 minutes, too. And in the age of three-hour-long epics, that’s a fact I can appreciate.

Grade for Good Night, and Good Luck: 8