Good Night, and Good Luck.

Rarely when an actor tries to direct does it work, and when it does you get "character study" without all the supporting scaffold a real filmmaker would provide.

Clooney is a smart man who knows this. So he structures his projects in ways that are well serviced by what he has to give. The last one was an actor playing a character who created a character within. The structure of the thing was all focused on building and exploiting those ambiguities.

Especially clever were the staging devices. Many were novel and a few were particularly striking.

Now this is a more serious, but has the same values. It is after all a character study, and one that deals with these same two worlds. The man when off the camera, and the man on. Fabricated truth as an act by politicians. "Journalism" as way of piercing through those layers.

Two evils, McCarthy and Paley. Clooney's point is that control over the pipeline is what matters in delivering the "real." So he works with some very studied staging. This movie has some of the best staging in recent memory. It must have taken forever to set the angles and lighting. Fortunately these are so powerful that no scene needs more than two setups. This is the way this cinematographer works for PT Andersen too.

The switch in lighting from when Murrow is on the air to just after he goes off is rather thrilling: both are intense, in fact the on-air lighting is stark. But there is a powerful and visible shift from external to internal energy.

If you just saw the script as words on a page, it would seem boring and preachy. It is the staging that makes this thing come alive, that gives a container for the great acting. The only actor who seems off is McCarthy, which is telling.

I have the book Clooney's dad wrote about movies. Fortunately the son has better insights into what works and what doesn't, and has good intuitions about what to attempt.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Well-acted across the board, I loved the Patricia Clarkson-Robert Downey combo so much that I kind of wish they had their own movie. Stylish and effective cinematography- the darting to and fro, the perpetual smoke, the use of shadow and silhouette. All very well done. And the overall message of the film- that the media and the American public need to wake the *beep* up and pay attention- is one that I heartily commend.

Part of my problem with the film stems from the fact that I am a history student with a keen interest in the time period. And Clooney does nothing to place his story in historical context. He's just taking pieces of a story and expecting the audience to fill in the rest. Like the loyalty oath piece. It really has nothing to do with the rest of the film. It is not explored further in any other scene. It is not really debated. Just one scene, designed to get the audience to recoil and say "wasn't that horrible?" Then it's not mentioned again. No reference to Stalin...hell, no reference to the Cold War, the atomic bomb, the Korean War, or even any aspect of the Red Scare other than McCarthy. There's one line about Alger Hiss near the end, but it provides little context or explication. The film makes it seem like McCarthy was a one-man wrecking crew instead of a particularly ruthless and ambitious politician taking advantage of a fear that was already widespread and deeply penetrating.

And loyalty oaths still exist, by the way, and the truth is that for the most part we accept them. I had to sign a loyalty oath to be a public schoolteacher.

As for the idea that Clooney is trying to make commentary about how society has changed in the past 50 years, I agree that such is his intent. In this regard he is clearly inspired by Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, which his company produced and which he vigorously promoted. But Haynes does it much more elegantly. He shows his characters confounding their stereotypical roles; Clooney merely reinforces them. I wanted to see Patricia Clarkson's character do something other than fetch newspapers. I wanted to see a black character do something other than belt out jazz tunes that lay out the plot like something in an old musical. Otherwise, their presence smacks of tokenism, of the worst kind of liberal condescension. Also, Haynes' film is a fiction commenting on the fictional representations and actual reality of a bygone era. Clooney's is, at least in its central scenes, practically a documentary. Having subplots whose primary purpose is smug contemporary commentary detracts from the versimilitude.

The scene near the end in the office between Langella and Strathairn is the thematic lynchpin of the film. However, this is where I think Clooney most clearly falls short. It seems to me that they address Murrow's earlier complicity in the Red Scare (re:Alger Hiss) surreptitiously by burying it in a set of defensive comments that are presented like a bunch of excuses for the network's moral cowardice. It's scripted in such a way that Murrow does not have to respond. As for the idea that corporations run the media for profit and that the nightly news is more distraction than edification ...well, that was a bold statement when Network came out 30 years ago, not so much now anything more than stating the obvious. I wanted more from this.

I almost feel like Clooney was torn between making a documentary and making something truly scathing in the Network vein. As documentary the film is brought down by its lack of context, which is a shame because Strathairn's line readings are chillingly good. As social commentary the film simply doesn't say anything particularly perceptive, and at times it comes across as liberal bourgeois moralizing.

I've had the "Edward R. Murrow" Collection from CBS for years and have enjoyed watching it's biography of Murrow, the complete Milo Radulovich, McCarthy and Annie Lee Moss shows many times. I'm sure George Clooney must have these as well as he used the actual footage extensively in his fine drama "Good Night and Good Luck". As a previous poster said, by concentrating on what was actually presented, Clooney is able to focus on the ethical issues that were the real substance of the broadcasts, rather than the tragicomic personalities involved. He wants us to see that the same issues are in our lives today, (Clooney has had his own battles with would-be modern McCarthys like Bill O'Reilly), but he isn't going to force the issue. He's doing exactly what Murrow and Friendly did with the McCarthy broadcast: using the actual record to tell the story.

There are minor, but significant embellishments, mostly an impressive cast of actors who can tell us more with one look than an entire speech. Leading the way is David Straithairn as Murrow. Except for possessing a higher pitched voice than the original, he's got his man down cold. I would pick Frank Langella as William Paley, here presented as a man with ideals but who is rooted in the realities of business, the sort of guy who has to make the tough decisions the idealists like Murrow don't have to or want to deal with. Then there is Ray Wise as the vulnerable Don Hollenbeck, who was one of the co-creators of "You Are There", a program this film somewhat resembles. He wound up being "there" when he didn't really want to be.

What really enhances the show is the black and white photography, (actually, according to the notes, it was "The film was shot on color film on a grayscale set, then color-corrected in post" – whatever that means). Not only does it heighten the drama, (magazine photographers, in the days when they had a choice, said "black and white for drama, color for excitement"), but the tremendous resolution seems to bring out each furrow and poor on each person's face, allowing the viewer to see into their souls.

This film was a real treat, with Strathairn's dead-on performance as legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow a sure bet for at least an Oscar nomination. Perhaps the best decision by writer-director George Clooney was to cast no one in the role of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Instead, Clooney uses actual footage of McCarthy in the HUAC hearings and press conferences. Movies based on actual historical events often sensationalize events, but the extensive use of documentary footage brings home the reality of this movie's story line.

In addition to Strathairn's best performance to date, the entire cast delivers, from Clooney himself as Murrow's producer Fred Friendly, to Frank Langella as CBS chairman William Paley, to Ray Wise as the insecure anchorman Don Hollenbeck. If there is a weak point in the cast, it is Jeff Daniels, who was given little to do in the role of news director Sig Mickelson and did little with it.

As most people today are acquainted with the 1950s through black-and-white images, the decision to film in black-and-white also feels appropriate, and helps the documentary footage to blend in seamlessly with the filmed actors. The only real failing of the movie is the lack of real drama. Throughout, Murrow and the gang are seen to have the upper hand, although they sweat about the potential consequences of every action. The slice of history, the ideas presented concerning the proper role of news media, and the terrific performances all more than make up for this, however, and I strongly recommend this film to those who lived through the McCarthy era and to those, such as myself, who only have witnessed it in the rear view mirror.

I don't know where to begin. If one judges a film by its ability to literally transport the viewer to another time and place, this film succeeds. If one judges a film by the cinematography, the composition of the scenes, whether the characterizations are well drawn, this film succeeds. If one judges a film's merits on integrity, truthfulness, honesty, this film succeeds. Good Night and Good Luck captures a moment in time.We look back on the fifties as a simpler time, our period of innocence. This film tells us straight and true that it was no simpler and no more innocent than our lives today.In fact, the sharpest contrast drawn between today and back then is the intelligence and the literacy, the erudition and the commitment to the tenets of good journalism of Edward R. Murrow and his crew.I cannot picture a Brian Williams or anyone else telling the owner of the network, as Murrow tells Bill Paley, "I can't make it to the game tonight. Thanks for inviting me, but I'm busy tearing down your network." A flawlessly executed film, the acting ensemble well cast, the point clearly and eloquently made, this film should be nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe and anything else that's out there. Thank you George Clooney. Your father is correct. "You got it right." Thank you Steven Soderburgh. Thank you, Mr. Murrow.