MOVIES: Good Night and Good Luck, Revisited

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Some of you still here may remember that I saw Good Night, and Good Luck at the Bytowne back in 2005.

I didn't say very much about it on LJ at the time. But its release to the repertory and art-house cinemas in North American was at the midway point of the Bush II years for my American friends, and the very start of the Harper years up here in Canada. Directed by George Clooney, co-written by Clooney and Grant Heslov, a docu-drama about those months in 1954 leading up to the showdown between Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, from the POV of the See It Now team led by Murrow and Ed Friendly at CBS. It's probably available via iTunes and some of whatever competitors it has these days, if you can't get it from your video entertainment retailer of choice.

I rewatched it this afternoon, partly as stress relief for various reasons. Also, to remind myself that the anglophone portions of humanity here in North America have been in similar fixes before. The people responsible for them passed on their ideas of "proper lessons to be learned" to their heirs by birth, adoption, whatever and that's part of why we're in the soup to some extent yet again now.

It could have gotten further then. It may get worse than it was then this time. We don't know yet, despite our hopes and fears. And I've been dealing with a lot of fear of my own these past two months. Some of you know the reasons for those fears existing in the first place.

Anyway, I recommend it anew as a movie worth seeing in its own right, no matter the political climate at any given moment. The performances are quietly top-notch all the way down the line, from David Strathairn as Murrow and Clooney as Ed Friendly, through Frank Langella as CBS executive Bill Paley to Robert Downey Jr. as Ed Wershba. There are other performances of note and substance from the whole cast, and you're robbing yourself as a movie-watcher if you don't see this one at least once in your life.

And let's go forth with some of Murrow's commentary from that time, male-centric as it was in its time, yet still valid even now despite that flaw:

"We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular."