Predictable Blacklist Paranoia

Good Night, And Good Luck

Directed by George Clooney

Garçon Stupide

Directed by Lionel Baier

Of all the films about American heroism, the dullest are those paeans to the integrity of television and journalism: All the President's Men, Quiz Show, The Front, The Insider and now Good Night, and Good Luck. With this worshipful remembrance of CBS newscaster Edward R. Murrow, director, co-writer and co-star George Clooney climbs atop the ever-mounting frustrations of Hollywood ideologues, looks back from this great height to the golden subject of the 1950s blacklist and waves his Liberal bandanna.

The film's title turns Murrow's homiletic salutation into very contemporary snark. Luck is all that will save America now that democracy's primetime has faded into twilight. Instead of saying "God is on our side," Clooney laments, "We used to have Edward R. Murrow."

No wonder the film is opening the New York Film Festival. Clooney's stylish combo of media glorification, celebrity suck-up and fashionable dread rallies New York media, beltway pundits and Hollywood shills. It's impeccably timed to match the recent upsurge of personalized TV journalism like the battle-weary, post-Katrina anger worn by Anderson Cooper and Shepard Smith. Those newsreaders channeled Murrow's ghost, the same moralizing specter conjured by Clooney and his co-screenwriter, fellow actor Grant Heslov.

Good Night isn't really a biography but a hagiographic mood piece. Rather than personalize an idiosyncratic human being's vain instinct for the limelight, Murrow is used to represent the conscience of TV entertainers-from journalists to actors. Murrow is portrayed by David Strathairn, an actor constantly referred to as understated (Read: Dull). First shown speaking at a tribute dinner in the late '50s, Strathairn gloomily scans the exclusively white, glamorously attired diners then tells them of television's potential and warns about its failed mandate. He's like a prophet at the end of a sojourn and on the verge of transubstantiation. Slipping to an earlier 1953 flashback, the film covers Murrow's famous on-air battle with Senator Joseph McCarthy over the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Good Night doesn't scrutinize the era's Communist terror or its contentious political atmosphere; it simply puts a group of actors in the white-collar, cinched-dressed costumes of the era to perform quite a different passion play from that of Mel Gibson. Clooney ponders: "What Would Murrow Do?"

The best moment shows Murrow and producer Fred Friendly (played by Clooney) preparing for their live broadcasts. Friendly sits at Murrow's feet, both supplicant and confederate, tapping the great man's leg with a pencil to help time his voice-over narration. This inside-showbiz detail is an odd disclosure, unaccountably intimate and believable.

Other instances of network professionalism contain the usual TV-style of facile camaraderie (everything from "E.R." to "The West Wing"), except when Frank Langella struts onscreen portraying CBS head William Paley. Towering and stentorian, Langella recalls Jason Robards' authoritarian Ben Bradlee and Christopher Plummer's egotistical Mike Wallace but his plumy, stage-trained elocution gives Paley a patrician loftiness, the only thing that trumps Murrow's cigarette smoke halo. Good Night brims with such fawning elitism, the flaw that ruins most accounts of TV and newspaper life. Journalism is the profession that never critiques itself but stands apart as a special class and Hollywood, perhaps catering to journalists or itself guilty of the same lack of critical introspection, usually goes along with the self-aggrandizement.

When Warren Beatty was promoting Bulworth in 1998, he exposed the self-righteous pretenses of the media-elite in a bolder way than Michael Moore could muster by pointing out the arrogance of millionaire journalists pretending to speak on behalf of "the people" while, in political reality, putting smiley or concerned faces on the capitalist hoodwink of their sponsors and employers. Clooney doesn't risk genuine institutional critique; he's too infatuated with television.

As Good Night proceeds toward its predictable blacklist paranoia, it indulges early television lore the way The Bad and the Beautiful romanticized Hollywood history. Robert Redford's Quiz Show maintained the sense of an intellectually superior medium scrutinizing a delimiting one; but Good Night, like Michael Mann's The Insider, capitulates to TV, enshrining that medium's cultural diminishment. Thus, the film's bizarre visual conceit. Cinematographer Robert Elswit uses black and white photography that is alternately glossy and drab. Not esthetically provocative like Fassbinder's B&W Veronika Voss, it's a perversely nostalgic-and dissatisfying-evocation of old kinescopes. The enveloping grayness is anachronistic hindsight; it smugly lacks the "clarity" that the kinescope had for its time, thus denying that '50s Americans had 20/20 vision about their own reality. (Good Night was screened for critics in digital video, which might account for some of the blur.)

The film's primary-fatal-distortion parallels the Blacklist era to the paranoia today's liberals feel about the Bush administration. In his political naiveté, Clooney presumes that no one-other than the fanatical McCarthy-feared Communists. He even implies that there were no Communists except sadsack penitents like the laughably suicidal newscaster played by Ray Wise. A cowardly subplot features Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson as Murrow's colleagues scared of signing a loyalty agreement. (They're not commies either, they're just secretly violating the CBS policy against married employees.) Typical of blacklist rhetoric, this subplot fails to condemn the actual hatchet-man process. It not only dampens suspense, it dampens historical truth.

Clooney's pop history settles for glib mythology, as with Murrow's famous defense of Annie Lee Moss, a black woman McCarthy accused of being a communist. Clooney uses the incident to condemn McCarthy as racist without questioning news media racism. Instead, he contrasts the all-white CBS newsroom with imaginary scenes where jazz singer Dianne Reeves stands in for the patronized black presence. Reeves' show tunes (literalizing political cabaret) are irrelevant to any sense of real life politics-either the appeal of radicalism or its perceived threat.

However, Reeves' pure showbiz disguises Clooney's condescending smirkiness about showbiz. Murrow's "Person to Person" interview with flamboyant pianist Liberace provokes laughter even though in human terms the circumspect Liberace is only being as forthright about his personal life as he dares. He's no more secretive than Murrow, just fully aware of the era's threatening hurricane of homophobia. In Clooney's pompous cultural artifact, Liberace is the TV entertainer we're free to ridicule and question, not Murrow's TV saint.

Swiss filmmaker Lionel Baier gives his version of My Life on Ice the title Garçon Stupide. Baier uses the video documentary format to investigate the moral naiveté of a sexually compulsive gay Swiss youth, 22-year-old Loïc (Pierre Chatagny). Baier follows the analytic humanism of Alain Tanner and John Berger's 1972 La Salamandre (including a clip of Bulle Ogier's factory job stuffing sausages, a classic image of ennui and sexual anxiety). Baier dares to probe the dangerous, harmful ignorance of a generation ignorant of history and left to please itself. Garçon Stupide thoroughly critiques MTV culture, and thus the rampant capitalist instincts that prevent youths from understanding their place in the world. (Loïc's desperation is most poignant when he stalks soccer star Rui Alves, who epitomizes everything he isn't.) Turning non-fiction inside out, Baier explores Loïc's confusion with fear and grace. The final scene is an extraordinary-and romantic-representation of what self-discovery means. It starts the fall movie season with something close to greatness.