Good Night and Good Luck
43rd Annual New York Film Festival 2005
Opening Night Film

Reviewed by Evan Sung

The Film Society of Lincoln Center kicks off its 43rd Annual New York Film Festival with what is undoubtedly one of the most noble, well-intentioned and relevant American films of the year, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck. The film, Mr. Clooney’s second, is a look into journalism legend Edward R. Murrow’s on-air campaign to shed light on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s underhanded crusade against the spectre of Communism in America.

Built around extensive archival footage of the era and shot in a silky black and white, the film is a faithful and loving recreation of the late 1950’s. David Strathairn plays Murrow, and Clooney appears as Fred Friendly, Murrow’s loyal producer on the weekly news program “See It Now.” In the face of network anxiety and pressure from network sponsors, Murrow builds a public case against McCarthy’s dubious methods. His program, his words, and the response of the television viewing public leads eventually to a Senate investigation of the Senator McCarthy’s actions and the end of his notorious witchhunts. Mr. Clooney was so concerned with verisimilitude that he chose not to cast an actor as his Joe McCarthy, instead using real footage of the Senator himself. This period fidelity makes for a fascinating look at the realities of the era, the straightfaced ads for Kent cigarettes, the injunction at CBS against marriage between co-workers, the theatricality of McCarthy’s own viciousness.

But nostalgia is an alluring siren song, and about halfway through the film, you get the sense that between vintage clips and David Straithairn’s readings of Murrow’s transcripts, there isn’t much “there” there. Where Clooney’s first film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was a bold, slightly arch attempt to display his style and talent behind the camera, Good Night feels tentative. Mr. Clooney has gone the other way here and taken pains to suppress his directorial voice, confined by his reverence of Murrow, the noble newscaster sent to right the world’s wrongs. It’s as if Mr. Clooney were hugging the wall of a pool, afraid to cut loose and roam into the deep end. This also has implications for the film as a comment on contemporary affairs. The film draws clear parallels between the fearmongering of the 50s and our own terrorist-era anxieties, but they don’t so much resonate as wishfully long for how things used to be, how things should or could be.

It should be said that the film is stirring and does achieve thrilling moments in depicting the inherent drama of Murrow confronting demagoguery through the television screen. And Strathairn gives a performance of subtle glances, twitches, and reactions that convey the interior world of Murrow and turn the task of reading Murrow’s transcripts into a real dramatic role.

Mr. Clooney deserves credit for using his money and clout to realize a project that doesn’t have obvious commercial appeal, and to do it with no small degree of artistry, with a team of committed performers. Mr. Clooney is taking tentative but real steps towards becoming an influential player in Hollywood cinema both in front of and behind the camera. Good Night should bring him a healthy dose of critical respect to go with the overabundance of Rat-Pack-redux charm that has already won over audiences around the world.

George Clooney and David Straithairn

Lincoln Center |165 West 65th Street,
( between Broadway and Amsterdam)

A Tale of Two Cinemas:
Who’s Camus Anyway and A Tale of Cinema

Reviewed by Evan Sung

Two entries from the Far East screen at this year’s New York Film Festival, and though both tread the fuzzy line between reality and cinema, they couldn’t be more different.

Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s Who’s Camus Anyway? is a compulsively entertaining film; funny, intelligent, and even a bit troubling by the end. The film tells the story of a group of college students who have one week to prepare and film their first movie “The Bored Murderer.” They work under the faculty supervision of the aging, inscrutable Professor Nakajo, a former director whose heyday has long passed. The young director Matsukawa (Shuji Kashiwabara) struggles to balance the pressures of filmmaking with the suffocating attentions of his girlfriend Yukari and his need to bed almost every female member of his crew. Along the way, attraction and repulsion spread like a contagion among the others. Questions of reality and fiction are also brought into play as the cast and crew get deeper and deeper into the world of cinema and the murder at the center of their film.
The young characters in Yanigamachi’s film are a screwball amalgam of Fame rejects and every college/high school movie kid since The Breakfast Club. The way they play off of and ricochet off of one another is a light and airy pleasure, and Yanigamachi directs a fluid camera to reflect the pinballing exchanges among the principals. Sly references to virtually the whole history of cinema are buried throughout. Eventually, the star of the student film, Ikeda, takes a disturbing turn into what may or may not be unscripted madness. Riffing off of Camus’ The Stranger in the impassivity of the student/murderer, the film leaves the audience wondering about the cumulative effect of what seems like the harmless diversion of pop culture.

Hang Songsoo’s A Tale of Cinema is as plodding and morose as Yanagimachi’s film is ebullient. The film opens with a shiftless and indecisive young man who reunites with an ex-girlfriend. They wander the streets of Seoul together one night, and after some impotent sex, decide that they want to commit suicide together. Along the way, a great deal of bickering and whining and crying punctuate the “action,” such as it is. Eventually, we realize that the story we have been watching was just a film, and our real protagonist, Tongsu, walks out of the theater. Tongsu, himself a filmmaker, runs into a familiar woman, only to realize that she is the actress from the film he has just stepped out of.

In spending some time with the young actress, Yongsil, their actions and activities begin to echo the fiction they have both collaborated in, he as the viewer, she as the actress. They have sex, successfully at least, and death and suicide are discussed a lot. Like the kids in Who’s Camus Anyway, the fiction of the cinema world infects and confuses the reality of the “real world.” But here, Songsoo approaches everything with such gravity and earnestness that eventually you wish they would just kill themselves and escape the existential muck that they are forced to wallow in.
Any movie lover knows that we inevitably view our lives through the filter of cinema, our favorite films, actors, scenes. Movies are made for this. Both of the films reviewed here suggest that this kind of permeability approaches a kind of madness that resides in all of us. But if we’re all going crazy anyway, I’d rather have fun getting there.