Good Night and Good Luck Sitting Through This Bore

Good Night & Good Luck: George Clooney hovers over the film as its director, co-screenwriter, and a supporting actor. Clooney is talented in front of and behind the camera. The decision to film in black and white was a good one, and the director and cast capture the era well. (People with little sense of history, or those who are much younger, will be astonished at the amount of smoking and the sartorial elegance of the newsmen, reporters, and even administrative assistants.) This McCarthy era embellishment of life at CBS News and Edward R. Murrow falls short, though, for two reasons.

First, GN & GL is often ponderous. I enjoy "talky" movies that revolve around ideas, dialogue, and characters, but GN & GL is often repetitive and dull. While there is some sharp dialogue, and the acting talent is top-drawer (David Straitharn is brilliant, as Edward R. Murrow, in a role that seems created for him), the film is poorly paced. The only film I can compare it to is Robert Redford's Quiz Show, which is about the same era, and contains some common themes. It also was character and dialogue driven, but it was more interesting and crisp in execution. GN & GL plays at about 90 minutes, but by the end of the first hour, I began to hope for the ending.

Second, GN & GL slavishly toes the conventional, liberal wisdom as it scans backwards to the 1950s. In short, this film has a simple political and journalistic reality: McCarthy and those who were worried about the "threat of Communism" (the films prologue uses that phrase, which distinguishes these people from those worried about actual Communism) were dangerous, hostile to Civil Liberties, and disingenuous. Also, journalists, according to GN & GL, exist not to report the news, but to provide an opinion on the state of the news and newsmakers, so the journalist's craft is inherently subjective and assumes the journalists are adequate judges of the greater good of society. Journalists are, like the Hollywood scribes who created these fictional ones, leaders in a culture that is often wrong, backward, and hysterical. They are typewriter kings, shaping their preferred reality one peck at a time. The journalist, then, is an agent of justice, not a reporter. This noble view of the profession is the primary (or at least secondary) reason the mainstream news media in our country loses credibility by the day.

GN & GL also was created, clearly, as a commentary on our present politics, for Murrow questions why America is fighting for liberty abroad if we are unwilling to guarantee it at home. I almost expected a screed on the Patriot Act to be launched at any minute. The overwhelming sense of the film is that citizens are being suffocated not by the incessant smoking, but by a tyrannical government that strangles them (along with wicked corporations like CBS) until their freedom and money are gone. The great irony, of course, is that if America truly were tyrannical, greedy, and unconcerned about freedom, it would be hard to justify its foreign policy during the last one hundred years. The United States has been the greatest force for good in the world since 1917, and while it has been far from perfect (especially in its willingness to coddle dictators), it has been largely noble. If we were an empire, in the classical sense of the word, we would simply occupy and control countries until they outlive their economic usefulness. All of western Europe would be thoroughly Americanized (as distinct from modernized or classically liberalized), as would Japan, the Middle East, and whatever other regions we would have chosen. Instead, we have sought to export freedom (sometimes that choice has been foolish, but that is a different argument). We have rebuilt Western Europe and then protected it for a half-century from Communist domination. We rebuilt Japan and put it on the course to global, economic, competitiveness. We have not plundered the oil fields of the Middle East during the past five years, though we could have. We have watched as oil costs have sky-rocketed, and we have not, to my knowledge, even used those oil profits to pay for our military and economic losses in the region. We are hopelessly idealistic, we Americans.

The cold, hard truth is that America's stand against Communism did not destroy our rights and liberties at home, it instead defeated Communism. While I agree that McCarthy went too far in his investigations, and that he was a poor man to lead the fight domestically, there was reason for concern. The Rosenbergs were spies. Alger Hiss was a spy. They were not alone in their sympathy for, or allegiance to, the Communist menace.

Clooney and his ilk like to portray themselves as progressives, as leaders toward a happier America, as people who take great pains and make great sacrifices to shine the light of truth on America's history and frailties. (Let's put aside the debate about whether someone earning more than $15 million/film is sacrificing anything!) If this is so, it is stunning, then, that Hollywood has yet to produce a single film that examines the savagery of the USSR during the reign of Communism. I think some of Solzhenitsyn's work would make for riveting cinema. How about a film that chronicles the 50 million deaths during the Stalin's reign? How about one that examines, critically, Stalin's decision to starve his people into submission? How about a treatment of the gulags? Or, of the Katyn Forest Massacre where the Soviets executed more than 4,000 Polish Army officers?

The Hollywood spotlight finds its way toward topics with which the industry is comfortable, like the Holocaust, but it, magically, steers away from those that run afoul of Hollywood's love affair with socialism. Or, even those that touch upon the great liberals of American history. Only one mainstream film has been made about Roosevelt's decision to detain Japanese-Americans during the war. While Hollywood has fallen all over itself to document JFK's "heroism" during the Cuban missile Crisis, it has done nothing to expose his perfidy during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. While the Killing Fields did document the inhumanity of the Khmer Rouge, Hollywood has not chosen to examine the downfall of South Vietnam and the brutality visited upon its inhabitants shortly thereafter. It has made no heroic films of the boat people, either from Vietnam or from Cuba, nor has it chosen to condemn the wickedness of China's savagery in any meaningful way.

If Hollywood wants to wear the mantle of national conscience, please let it wear one that is broad enough to encompass all sins, not just those that are politically correct to expose.