Review: Good Night and Good Luck

Good Night and Good Luck has been described as a civics lesson. And it is most unabashedly so. The movie opens with a post-McCarthy Murrow lecturing an assembled gathering of television people about how the medium can be used to enlighten, not just entertain, its audience. Then the movie flashes back to the period surrounding Murrow's anti-McCarthy episodes of See It Now.

As an entertainment, the movie is an equivocal success. Much of the drama is defanged by the passage of time. Any student of history knows that the broadcast happened and that McCarthy ended up self-destructing. While the movie attempts to convey the paranoia of the day, it never quite resounded with me. I was not involved enough in the characters to care about their eventual fates. But I was still riveted to the screen.

As a civics lesson, it is an unequivocal success. The movie tells a story that has a certain resonance in a post-911 America where the public is only to ready to cede their civil liberties to a demogogue who plays to fear. Current day America is also involved in a "hot war/cold war" just like 1950's America (Iraq/Korea - Communism/Terrorism). We can only hope that someone both brave and credible can step forward to pull the cloak away from the figure as Murrow did with McCarthy.