Good Night, and Good Luck.

I love George Clooney's filmmaking career, in theory, because the execution so far has left me with mixed feelings both times. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind had great style, excellent performances, some very cool stuff in it (Julia as a killer!) but overall, it wasn't memorable for some reason, and I always love those kind of movies. Now Good Night, and Good Luck., which I should love because of my adoration for journalism movies, is kind of the same, but disappointing, because I was really looking forward to it.

Set in the mid-fifties, Clooney puts us in an era not everybody knows about. On my part, I know who Senator McCarthy was and all his stuff regarding communism, but I've never heard about Edward R. Murrow before, the CBS Newsman whose send off line is the movie's title. Apparently Murrow and McCarthy had a big fight that went on for months. McCarthy from his press conferences and Murrow using his TV news show, which people watched religiously every day, more people than if you added together all of the current news shows numbers. The news were huge back in the day, and the way the movie works is very historical and journalistic, my problem with it was that we learn what happened during those months of the debate, but nothing else. Nothing about why it started and then nothing about what happened later, which really frustrated me because it was really necessary.

There's a very good performance by David Strathairn as Murrow. Very focused and I'm betting spot on. But is also very monotonous. There are no feelings expressed other than the guts he had to do what he did, but it's always with a blank face. It's not his fault though, because what he's giving to is excellent, but being that this a real person, he should've been developed a lot more but end up knowing nothing about him, and it's not like everybody in the world, these days, knows who Ed Murrow was.
There's also Clooney himself who plays Murrow's producer Fred Friendly, the man who backs him up and goes to war (figuratively) with him. Clooney gives a more vivid performance that is much vivid or else the movie with be a borefest.
The only other worth remembering performance is Frank Langella's who plays CBS President William Paley, who was not was not behind the idea of going against McCarthy. There's some great scenes between the 3 of them as they battle the way the news will be given and what each of them will give in exchange for what they want.
But other than that is all pretty much a waste. I can't even remember what was Jeff Daniels doing in the movie, and then you have the subplot concerning Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson), a married couple working together in the same team as Murrow's, but their story is that about the fact that it was prohibited for married couples to work together, and so they kept it in the shadows for a long time. Or so they thought.

The movie is only 93 minutes, but it feels a lot longer. Not sure why though, because the fact that it is in black and white was not the reason I almost fell asleep around the 60 minute mark. The B&W actually worked really well honoring those times, and the way it looked, specially when everybody was smoking and there was smoke on most of the screen, it was excellent and it gave the movie a great visual style. There's also the music, as old jazz is sang and given focus doing the movie, performed on screen by Dianne Reeves.
And that Senator McCarthy is played by himself in film footage of the actual Senate sub-committee testimony, that was a great that worked really well and made the movie than it could've been if an actor played him.

Still, it's all about how it finished for me. Besides the movie not giving us a resolution to Murrow's and Friendly's happenings, the Joe and Shirley's subplot ends also without one, and that's why Good Night, and Good Luck. is so disappointing, because they engage us in these times, important and very interesting, but then they leave us without an ending.