Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?

[darth_cabal]

My mother and I went to see Good Night... and Good Luck" today. Let me tell you, that's one fantastic movie. The film is spare, but has brilliant acting and interesting cinematography

Comments

Wow, this is going to be a long reply.

[darth_cabal]

I actually liked that the film didn't have a great deal of triumph and dealt with the characters only enough to humanize them. For one thing, I love understated acting. The type of grandstanding, emotathug, clash-of-good-and-evil heroes that Hollywood likes to indulge in turn me off, both because I find them less admirable and because I find them less realistic.

To me, depicting the Murrow as having triumphed over McCarthy would have ruined the film. For one thing, he didn't. Murrow's condemnation of McCarthy's methods was only the first nail in McCarthy's coffin, and it resulted in a significant setback in Murrow's career. This wasn't a grand victory; it was a little bit of ground gained in a war that will last forever.

For another, to depict it as a triumph would be to undercut the two greatest messages of the film. At the time, the outcome mattered, but to movie-goers today, the more important thing is that they took the chance with little certainty of how it would turn out. Similarly, the beginning and end of the movie tie it all together as just one example of the need for journalistic and intellectual integrity. Murrow starts off giving a speech about the danger of allowing TV--and especially TV news--to be nothing more than entertainment. (Hello, cable news! Fancy meeting you here.) At the end, we see that genuine journalism has made the network nervous, and Murrow is shuffled off to do weekend fluff pieces. To me, this depiction of the vindication and the dangers of doing one's job well was worth far more than an adrenaline shot.

As for the lack of character development...I kind of liked that, too. They needed a bit of interaction to humanize them, but the characters weren't the point of the story. They were the medium through which it was told in this instance. The story wasn't about Murrow, it was about professional journalists acting as such. Murrow may have gotten (and deserved) the most attention, but it's not him as a person that was the issue--it's him as a newsman. The Wershbas' (Downey and Clarkson) relationship served the story, IMO. Their discussion of the contract in the beginning helped establish the paranoia of the era. Their "everyone knows you're married" meeting at the end facilitated the movie in showing that--despite Murrow's "win"--the network took a hit and had to fire people. The "take off your ring" scene in the middle was simply necessary to explain the end. Besides, it was humanizing and they established a couple facts of the story in the process.

I do agree that they could have done a better job of showing the terror of the time. Maybe they were relying on the fact that the McCarthy era is so memorable in American history to fill in the blanks (at least for the American audience)?