George Clooney (29 page)

Part of the difficulty in criticizing
Good Night, and Good Luck
is similar to a potential response to a film like
Schindler's List
(Steven Spielberg,
1993), whose moral authority is such that criticizing its form seems petty. Like
Fail Safe
, it deals with real events, in portentous black-and-white, and both clearly have a strong remit to educate a younger generation, possibly ignorant of a series of cataclysmic events in mid-twentieth-century history. The film is a nostalgic look back at a time when American culture had figures in the media whose faces and voices represented a sense of informed trust—someone, like Walter Cronkite (actually recruited by Murrow at CBS), who would tell the viewers the truth. There is a sense in which the Academy not only appreciates a film about a closely related industry but that in acknowledging it in award terms, it accepts the truth of Murrow's words, that is, that it can accept a chastening word from one of its own about the educational function of visual mass media.

Rather than trying to produce a bio-pic, Clooney and Heslov focus on a specific, career-defining moment in Murrow's life. The film, like Murrow's own shows, manages to condemn McCarthy by extended use of footage of the man himself, browbeating witnesses and then later in the Moss case high-handedly excusing himself after only seven minutes, assuming his job is done. Annie Lee Moss may or may not have been a spy, but in a sense this is not the point. Like John McClellan, the Democratic senator from Arkansas who stood up for the principle of not trying individuals “by hearsay evidence,” Clooney suggests that it is the denial of her constitutional right to face her accusers that is at stake. Branding Clooney as unpatriotic is as unconvincing as those accusations leveled at anyone who questioned McCarthy and his methods. Any film adaptation involves editing and selecting material, so the notion that there is a single truth in a situation is specious. However, Clooney does admit that the script radically compresses the time between Murrow's programs and the Senate investigating McCarthy from a few months to the very next day, thereby exaggerating the immediate power of the protagonist's broadcast. Similarly, the Murrow/Paley exchange really took place several months later.

It is also true that McCarthy contributed to his own downfall with his browbeating arrogance, descending into incoherence while ranting at witnesses and particularly in his rebuttal, calling Murrow “the cleverest of the jackal pack” at the point when Murrow's stock with the American viewer had never been higher, after his war reporting from London during the Blitz (the source of the film's title and his closing farewell phrase) and his growing audiences for the more mainstream populist content on
Person to Person
.

It is ironic that the film should win an Oscar for best original screenplay, when arguably the biggest achievement in
Good Night, and Good
Luck
is its adherence to sources, including extensive film footage of McCarthy hearings. During their research, Clooney and Heslov realized that documentaries such as
Point of Order
actually edited together testimony from different days, so in a sense they had to act as documentary makers themselves and go back to primary material, often in quite a poor state. Rigid Oscar categories can often seem problematic, and perhaps Best Adapted Screenplay would be a better description, albeit from multiple sources. Murrow's comments about “If none of us ever read a book that was dangerous … ,” ending with “the terror is right here in this room,” and Wershba's tongue-in-cheek response all derive directly from Wershba's own recollection of the exchange. On the other hand, the film should not be criticized for a lack of creativity when it takes great pains to be accurate to a series of specific events in an extremely limited setting, meaning it is really closer to docudrama than an overtly fictional narrative (with male actors instructed not to wear makeup). A film about journalistic integrity needs to be similarly principled in its script and production. Clooney had key personnel available, like Milo Radulovich himself, Friendly's sons and wife, and members of Murrow's family, Ruth and Casey, at the initial read-through and even at times on set to advise about accuracy; he also enjoyed the company of individuals who, for him, are unsung personal heroes. Material has been assembled that produces a compelling narrative, despite the script including some fairly meaty content, linguistically, culturally, and politically. It is essentially a film of ideas and juxtaposed speeches to give a sense of the importance of the drama being played out for the hearts and minds of the American people but also perhaps to show the potential power of the emerging medium of television and the tragedy that it is so rarely used to its fullest potential.

The success of this film looks forward to other explorations of journalistic integrity, like
Frost/Nixon
(Ron Howard, 2008), which also starred Frank Langella playing a lugubrious figure of authority and likewise featured a climactic TV interview, which reflected the political life of the nation as well as the power and importance of investigative journalism and asking sufficiently probing questions at the right time.

For Clooney the prime responsibility of a director is to get the casting right (as much a job of a producer) after which actors should be allowed to get on with their jobs as professionally as possible with minimum disruption from the ego of the director. Clarkson describes Clooney's comments to actors as “incredibly eloquent and succinct.”
⁷
The notion of a
bond between the supporting cast, most of whose parts were not offered up for audition, was also helped by the fact that Reed Diamond (John Aaron), Tate Donovan (Jesse Zousmer), and David Strathairn had already worked together on
Memphis Belle
(Michael Caton-Jones, 1990). In terms of the dialogue, Clooney tries to give it a sense of a period feel by avoiding unnecessary exposition, effusive outpourings of emotion, and a certain understatement (possibly reflective of the wartime culture). At the same time, Clooney can get away with clichéd description in the shooting script, like “you could cut the tension with a knife,” since he knows he is working among friends and he himself is directing.
⁸

In terms of Clooney's career, as an actor it marks a further step in his maturity as an ensemble player, but more significantly, as a cowriter and director it showed that he could embrace an important, complex issue and produce a well-made piece of cinematic art. At the same time, the DVD audio commentary, where he jokes several times about his 1997 award as “The Sexiest Man Alive,” shows that he still finds it hard to watch himself on film or take himself too seriously. As in
Confessions
, special effects are mostly achieved by theatrical, mechanical means in front of the camera, but planning had to be even tighter as the shooting schedule was only a third as long. The effect of the elevator opening onto different floors is created by production designer Jim Bissell using a relatively simple rotating effect, so that the doors open onto a different environment.

It is true that Murrow was not the only critic of McCarthy and that the film does focus on his battle alone, ignoring attacks on McCarthy by print journalists (such as Joseph and Stewart Alsop) or the delay that Murrow took in deciding to take on McCarthy (the real Fred Friendly was less patient), and it certainly compresses the effects on McCarthy's downfall. It makes Murrow's stand seem slightly more heroic perhaps than it was; but that apart, as a defining moment of what broadcast journalism is capable, it is still a brave film to make. For a budget of only $7 million, an extremely limited setting, in black-and-white, and with language that is dense and unforgiving in its lack of exposition (explanatory, colloquial intertitles, such as “That's the Evil of it,” were cut from the shooting script), it is an ambitious film, determined to be faithful to its sources. Whereas what was at stake in
Fail Safe
was literally the survival of the world, here it is ideas about moral truth and integrity, calling people to account, and the potential of the medium of television, which hang in the balance, arguably more difficult issues to make the viewer care about. Like Murrow's success with
See It Now
, Clooney's film effectively uses the personal to bring out wider political concerns without falling headlong
into a didactic history lesson. Television, and by extension its big-screen relative, can definitely still be more than “wires and lights in a box.” Clooney's early work might well fall into the type of programming that is being criticized by Murrow, but post-1997 he has moved toward a more high-minded view of what films to make and most have an aesthetic or political core that mark them as more than just mere entertainment.

On the audio commentary, Clooney terms Langella's scenes as “Shakespearean” in their weighty tone and Murrow uses a key quote from
Julius Caesar
in expressing his view that all of society bears some responsibility for allowing McCarthyism to spread (“the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”). The text, and the notion of betrayal, anticipates Clooney's forthcoming political film,
The Ides of March
(2012), based on Beau Willimon's 2008 play
Farragut North
in which Clooney plays presidential hopeful, Governor Mike Morris. Production was delayed after the cultural euphoria surrounding Obama's election, making a downbeat tale of political infighting and cynical manipulation around a Democratic primary in Ohio seem out of kilter with the public mood. Luckily, for Clooney, if not for Obama, such sentiments quickly evaporated so that the global release of the film in an election year is a timely comment on an unseemly battle for power. The use of a poster glimpsed behind Morris, clearly similar in style to that used in the Obama campaign, links the fictional politician with contemporary Democratic campaigning strategies, and although the implication is that political expediency cuts across all parties, it is the scheming within Democratic ranks that is the film's subject.

Like in
Confessions
and
Good Night, and Good Luck
, Clooney takes a peripheral role, partly to ease the pressure on his own direction. The prime focus is on press secretary Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) and his moral trajectory from young idealist (“nothing bad happens when you're doing the right thing”) to ruthless blackmailer. In the process, it emerges that Morris has had a brief affair with an intern, Molly (Evan Rachel Wood), clearly paralleling events in the Clinton administration. As journalist Ida Horowicz tries to warn Meyers that as a politician, Morris “will let you down, sooner or later.” It is perhaps the depth of Meyers's naiveté, verging on hero worship, that makes the tarnishing of Morris's image much harder for him to accept. Grubby behavior in one arena is reflected in another: campaign manager Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) rejects Meyers as a potential defector once his cover is blown, Horowicz threatens to reveal a meeting Meyers had with Duffy unless she is told some insider gossip, and Meyers loses interest in Molly, failing to meet her after dropping her off at an abortion clinic. Finding Molly's
dead body in a hotel after her despairing suicide, his first reaction is to steal her phone to cover his tracks.

This is the first time Clooney has played a public figure and perhaps echoes why he routinely refuses any suggestion that he himself could pursue a political career. A little like Archie Gates clutching a ceasefire agreement in
Three Kings
, Morris claims in a TV debate that “my religion is a piece of paper: the Constitution.” Morris's moral platitudes delivered to a crowd at the end are seen as hollow, but so too is Meyers's position. Molly is sacrificed by his character but also perhaps by the narrative as a whole. Her pursuit of Meyers (though pregnant), her need for money despite coming from a rich background, whether her death was deliberate or accidental—all need a little more detail to be wholly convincing. The object of his admiration (Morris) is diminished but so is his own integrity, something trumpeted in Morris's campaign rhetoric. Meyers's blank stare into the camera at the end of the film reflects not only the opening scene where he is testing a microphone with phrases about religion that he appears (at that point) to believe in but that by the end he has literally become the thing he despised only a few short weeks before.

Clooney's interest in politics extends beyond the screen. In September 2006 he addressed the UN Security Council to urge greater action over the disputed Darfur region of southern Sudan. He traveled to China and Egypt in December that same year (and again with friend Don Cheadle in 2008) to press leaders there to exert any political influence they may have over the same issue. Clearly, any celebrity making political statements is open to criticism of being ill-informed and just following the latest trend in supporting a given cause. To his credit, Clooney has stuck with this single cause for a long time, informing himself better so that he can answer detailed questioning and agreeing to interviews even when he does not always have a new film to promote. It is also an expression of his dissatisfaction with entertainment-based news (although ironically he is part of that) and an attempt to focus on a story with some hard visual information to back it up. This was taken a stage further in 2010 when he agreed to be involved with the Sentinel Satellite Project, which used high-quality satellite photography to record any potential war crimes that might be taking place in southern Sudan.

It was as if the CIA lived in a parallel universe.

—Bob Baer
¹

Clooney certainly seems interested in the intelligence work of shadowy government departments from the more realistic
Syriana
to the openly absurd
Men Who Stared at Goats
. In
Confessions
, as Jim Byrd he plays a role that politically he may reject but is dramatically interesting. Byrd claims that killing enemies of the state for the CIA represents “honest work for good pay” but we do not really see this. The precise reasons for the assassinations are never explained to Barris or the viewer, we do not see much evidence of the gratitude of the nation, which Byrd promises, and the training the wannabe killers receive seems amateurish and played for laughs. Instructor Jenks (Robert John Burke), as a tyrannical drill sergeant, accidentally injures a volunteer in demonstrating combat skills. Barris himself draws cartoons, while supposedly taking notes on torture techniques, and then is seen later boarding buses with all the other trainees, dressed as stereotypical spies in identical long coats and hats.