Good Night, and Good Luck


Artykuł pochodzi z pisma "Guardian"


Peter Bradshaw
Friday February 17, 2006
The Guardian

Like a cadaverous matinee idol, holding his cigarette aloft at eye-level with an aesthete's fastidious poise, Ed Murrow dominates the screen. Murrow was the legendary American newsman - superbly played here by David Strathairn - who in 1953 took on anti-communist inquisitor Senator Joe McCarthy in a series of CBS TV specials. The title is taken from Murrow's nightly sign-off, a phrase of curiously dismissive stoicism, which somehow implied that for all his efforts the US of A might have gone to hell in a handbasket by the time he was back on air the following day.

George Clooney has directed and co-written a downbeat account of the McCarthy standoff, and his film is evidently intended as a counterblast to boisterous neocon-revisionist attempts to rehabilitate the controversial senator. Handsomely photographed in black-and-white, it adoringly recreates the pioneer days of US television in the 1950s. Clooney himself plays Murrow's genial editor, Fred Friendly, and Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr play two of the loyal CBS staffers who all repair with Murrow to the local bar for a manly scotch or three after the show, like Frank Sinatra's retinue. McCarthy plays himself in genuine newsreel clips, and the film effectively interrogates his posthumous reputation as it appears on the flickering screen. It all has a slightly inert, docudrama quality, like something BBC4 might commission if it wanted to spend 10 years' total programming budget on one 90-minute feature.
The movie is freighted with its own invisible criticism of contemporary American media politics - and the extent and nature of this criticism is not easy to gauge. It is clearly a labour of love for Clooney, whose father Nick was a TV news anchor, and in 2004 an unsuccessful Democrat contender for a congressional seat in Kentucky. The director certainly saves an important line for the end. Addressing a back-slapping dinner in his honour, Murrow coolly declines to join in the self-congratulatory mood and instead denounces TV's complacency and insularity, pointedly wondering if any future television executive will be interested in commissioning a report on, say, "America's policy in the Middle East". We are invited to wonder: would any of today's news professionals want to take on a modern McCarthy? Or is it the TV newsmen themselves, in the Fox News era, who are the McCarthys - boorish and conceited celeb-inquisitors in the media state? Clooney may or may not have intended the third in this chain of implied questions: are these opinionated Rottweilers simply Murrow's heirs?
The movie is austere in emotional content - as if it assumes, in dramatic terms, the cold impartiality that CBS boss Bill Paley (Frank Langella) accuses Murrow of neglecting. There are no big dramatic surprises. Clooney is not interested in showing a dark side to Murrow and certainly not a sympathetic side to Joe McCarthy. David Straithairn portrays the toughly laconic newsman with tremendous control and reserve, a granite block of unsmiling integrity with a curt manner of speaking, worlds away from modern TV presenting. Murrow grimly explains to his liberal colleague Don Hollenbeck - a superb performance from Ray Wise - that he cannot defend him against attacks from the conservative papers because he needs to conserve firepower for his own McCarthy battle. This has terrible consequences. Is Murrow eaten up with grief and guilt? It is a mystery. He remains impassive, like a soldier.
He is spectacularly un-modern in other ways, too. Murrow smoked like a chimney on screen and Kent cigarettes sponsored his show. Did he hold his fags up like that so we could see the brand? Like all his colleagues, he was unthinkingly sexist. Murrow agreed to do penitential and indeed mendacious interviews with vacuous stars to make up for his boat-rocking political pieces. After an excruciating on-air chat with Liberace, asking him about marriage plans and such, one junior reporter timidly congratulates Murrow and Strathairn's tiny moue of polite weariness speaks volumes.
It is all outstandingly performed and photographed, but what a strange experience it is for a critic to watch a film prescribing the reviews it expects to receive. Murrow and his boys are shown eagerly reading their own notices after the show, joyfully punching the air at righteous plaudits from the liberal New York Times, but gulping back the tears at attacks from those reactionary meanies working for the Hearst press. Well - ahem! - no reviewer would want to make these decent guys cry or put their heads in a gas oven. Certainly this one doesn't. And happily there is no occasion to, given the classy acting and cerebral script. As for the controversy of abandoning impartiality in the face of Joe McCarthy's bully-ism, I was reminded of Churchill's elegant dismissal of the subject. He did not care to be impartial between the firemen and the fire.

aloft- w górze, wysoko
austere- skromny, oszczędny
boisterous- gwałtowny, porywczy
boorish- prostacki, gburowaty
cadaverous- trupioblady
contender- pretendent, ubiegający się
counterblast- gwałtowny sprzeciw
curt- zjadliwy, szorstki
downbeat- powściągliwy, ostrożny
excruciate- męczyć
fastidious- wybredny, wymagający, drobiazgowy
freighted- naładowany
gauge- mirzyc, oceniać
gulp- przełykać
imply- dawać do zrozumienia; implikować; insynuować
insularity- zaściankowośc
interrogate- zadawać pytania, przesłuchiwać
matinee idol- uwielbiany, bezkrytycznie kochany idol
mendacious- kłamliwy, fałszywy
moue- wyraz dezaprobaty
plaudit- poklask, aplauz
poise- postawa; wytwornośc
retinue- orszak, świta, asysta


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