Review: Good Night, and Good Luck

I do not know what to think of this movie. I think I know who will go to this movie and appreciate it, liberals who go to anti-war protests, because to them everything is a repeat of the fights of the 1950s and 1960s. But I have no idea if this movie has an agenda like that. It seems to me to be nothing more or less than a celebration of one George Clooney's heroes, Edward R. Murrow in his finest hour. No frills, no extra drama, just a short (1 hour 33 minutes) movie showing approximately how the confrontation between Murrow and McCarthy went down with bookends of a speech Murrow made warning against television becoming nothing more than a box for entertainment without courage or information.

In some ways this was a very daring movie to make because it does so little editorializing about what is wrong now, or then, it just presents how things were. But in other ways it is without any courage because the only bit of editorializing it makes is using Murrow to attack an easy target, television. The idiot box is something everyone thinks there is something wrong with, but almost everyone watches it anyways. And I think if there is something wrong with television news it is wrong with every sort of "news" out there from print to internet.

Perhaps this is a movie everyone should go to see, not for the reasons the activists think because it would wake up Americans to the evils of the current administration, but as a national memory of what happened. On the other hand it could just be a symptom of the problem, which is people will go to this and think they know something about McCarthyism. In the end I have no idea what to make of this movie or even if I enjoyed it or not.