Clooney uses stark contrasts to illustrate Murrow's work

Clashing personalities and values appear throughout the black-and-white film.
By BRUCE NEWMAN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
In "Good Night, and Good Luck," our current fractured media landscape -- in which news is no longer presented as a parade of facts, but as a clash of competing ideas -- is seen at its fiery baptism, the right reverend Edward R. Murrow presiding.
As America's most exalted newsman, Murrow (played by David Strathairn) was the first deacon in the televangelism of speaking truth to power. Broadcast journalism was the work of faceless newsreaders until Murrow became its prickly paladin, charging up Capitol Hill in 1953 to take on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was burning witches at the stake to purge the country of a vast communist conspiracy.
McCarthy's bullying tactics produced a climate of such acute dread that, as we learn from the film, even Murrow had been pressured into signing a loyalty oath. But Murrow recognized the power of the new medium and used his CBS documentary show "See It Now" to expose the witch hunt by telling the story of Air Force Lt. Milo Radulovich.
Radulovich had been drummed out of the service without a hearing after being told he would have to denounce his father and sister as communist sympathizers to keep his job. As "Good Night" begins, Murrow and "See It Now" producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney, who also directed and co-wrote the movie) decide to use the case to take on McCarthy, without actually mentioning his name.
Inside the newsroom
Before the piece airs, Murrow is warned by a CBS executive that, if he doesn't give equal time to the Air Force, he is crossing the line from reporting into advocacy. "I simply cannot accept that there are two equally logical arguments on every story," Murrow replies.
The picture brilliantly captures the buzz of the hive at CBS News that precedes the live broadcasts. When the camera finally settles on Murrow, awaiting his cue while inhaling one of his trademark cigarettes, it is a moment of such intense intimacy that Friendly is able to start the program by gently tapping a pen on his star's leg.
"Good Night, and Good Luck" never attempts to be a conventional biopic, the kind in which we learn that Murrow's disdain for bullies was forged on his grammar school's playground. We never meet his wife, see his home or find out if the cigarettes that he chain-smokes through every broadcast finally killed him. (They did. He died of lung cancer in 1965.) It attempts to cover only one sequence of events, and this it does wonderfully well.
Simplifies reality
The picture is shot in high-contrast black and white, which gives it an authentic, period feel. But by using the original footage from Murrow's "Person to Person" interview with Liberace -- during which the pianist gaily discusses his marital prospects -- Clooney invites us to smirk at the closet where Liberace burned his candelabra at both ends. (The knowledge that it is no longer pinkos that conservative fundamentalists fear, but a world ablaze in Liberace pink, colors the movie in its own way.)
Often, the movie treats history as black and white, too, reducing McCarthy and his evil-ism to pure villainy, while elevating Murrow to sainthood. It was more complicated than that.
"See It Now" and "Person to Person" formed the yin and yang of Murrow's fealties to CBS boss William S. Paley (played with an aristocratic thuggishness by Frank Langella).
The movie suggests that the two men squared off like Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII, and that the clash of values between news and entertainment was a struggle for the soul of network television. But it was Murrow's theatricality, after all, that made him a star.
Ring of truth
Emboldened by the success of the Radulovich broadcast, which led to his case's being reopened, Murrow and Friendly decide to "go right at" McCarthy and let the junior senator from Wisconsin hang himself with his own words. The film accomplishes the same thing with archival footage that brings McCarthy barking back to life.
In his closing editorial, Murrow summons up the fear that McCarthyism created, then rejects it with an eloquence rarely heard now in American life. "We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world," he says, looking balefully at the camera, "but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
Half a century later, Murrow's warning still has the clamorous ring of truth. Rarely moving a facial muscle except to exhale smoke and brimstone, Strathairn wonderfully recaptures Murrow's deadpan delivery style. But it is the movie's unflinching appraisal of a moment when the fate of the republic was teetering in the public square that makes you grateful for as much "Good Luck" as you can get.