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I hold the heretical view that George Clooney is a more interesting film director than he is a film star and a better helmer than his production partner, Steven Soderbergh.

It’s clear that Clooney’s very smart second film, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” (USA/Warner Independent Features), is superior to his novel first one, “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” (2002), about the spy fantasies of the game show producer Chuck Barris.
“Good Night” concerns the preeminent TV newsman of the Fifties, Edward R. Murrow, the dragon slayer who took on and did-in the toxic Red baiter, Senator Joseph McCarthy.
It would seem that Clooney is preoccupied with television and its decline. His father, Nick, was a respected news anchorman in Cincinnati for 30 years, and Clooney himself came to prominence in two seasons of the hospital series “ER,” as well as such video dramas as “Fail Safe” and the forthcoming “Network.”

By its selection as the Festival’s Opening Night film, “Good Night” was proclaimed an exceptional picture, and it clearly is. David Straithairn, the noted stage actor, who has previously appeared in supporting roles in John Sayles’ films, becomes Murrow, the elegantly articulate moralist, Murrow the ultimately lethal chain smoker, and Murrow the political conscience of CBS and the nation. The non-smoking Straithairn was obliged to go through 4 packs of herbals a day, for the entire shoot, without coughing.
Straithairn’s impersonation of Murrow is so uncanny that he rivaled Philip Seymour Hoffman, who incarnated Truman Capote, another public figure of the era, for Best Actor at the Oscars.

“Good Night, and Good Luck,” Murrow’s signature sign-off, was uttered a decade or more before color television’s prominence. But it was audacious, though inevitable, of Clooney to make his film in black-and-white, matching his use of the actual black-and white kinescopes of McCarthy. (Clooney thought the role of McCarthy, the bogeyman, was too outsized, familiar, and villainous for any actor to recreate.)
Along with the film’s 50-year old subject matter, the use of authentic black-and-white film stock was also a liability for the producer-director. Clooney explained that b&w stock is considerably slower to process than color stock, on which most current b&w films are shot. Color film leaves residual shades of a purplish hue, which Clooney dislikes. However, making the film in black-and-white made raising production funds a tedious chore, as the studios all prefer to market color films.
However, Clooney’s art films are cross-collateralized with all the commercial biggies he’s done for Warners, including “Batman and Robin.” (Batman’s pointed nipple bat suit breast plate is one of Clooney’s favorite, self-deprecating references.)
I always believed, mistakenly, as this film demonstrates, that Murrow was the white knight who shamed a vicious bully into folding his tent. But “Good Night” shows that the McCarthy shoot-out served to diminish Murrow’s prestigious career as a muckracker, as well as it did McCarthy’s as a wicked prosecutor.
CBS chieftain Bill Paley (marvelously played by a white-haired Frank Langella) informs Murrow that his controversial forum, “See It Now,” gives him fearful stomach pains (likely ulcers), and Paley summarily shifts this prestigious, primetime program–whose controversy had cost them its sponsor, Alcoa–to the Sunday afternoon “ghetto” for five, final, half-hour spots.

There are two oddities about the picture, which mar it for some viewers. One is a rather negligible and shadowy sub-plot concerning a couple of Murrow’s ancillary producers, Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson), who keep skittering suspiciously around the edges of the central, control-room drama. They ultimately become a not-so-red herring, as we surmise they are close to being outed for their past Communist affiliations. As it turns out, they are not Red but wed–illicitly married, because, back then, CBS did not sanction married couples working at the network.
When Clooney was asked, at his press conference, precisely when CBS had lifted this marital ban, the droll charmer said that CBS had, presumably, lifted the ban in time for the current CBS chieftain, Les Moonves, to wed the far younger CBS talk show beauty, Joyce Chen. (The script, for which Clooney is top-billed, is as elegant as Murrow’s own, superbly written commentaries.)

It was hard for me, at first, to recognize Clooney in the film, wearing plastic spectacles and doughboy poundage as Murrow’s sidekick producer, Fred Friendly. (The weight gain, we learned, was carried over from the 35 pounds Clooney put on for his previous role in “Syriana.”)
The second oddity of “Good Night” is that its narrative is interrupted five times by the elegant song stylings of West Coast jazz artist Dianne Reeves. Clooney said that he wanted to show a 50’s studio’s multiple use, as the set is changed from Murrow’s “See it Now” to that of a bandstand variety show that features Reeves. On another occasion, Clooney claimed that he wanted to create an ironic, musical commentary similar to that of the M.C.’s ironic songs in “Cabaret.” Reeves’ version of “How High the Moon” lends mocking solemnity to the suicide of Don Hollenbeck, a local CBS newsman and former Murrow colleague who was literally hounded to death by the New York Hearst paper for his alleged Communist ties. There may, indeed, be a few too many of Reeves’ songs in the film, yet the film’s album (on Concord) is a great pleasure.
Although “Goodnight” is a 50’s period piece, it is clearly intended as a reproof of present-day network news divisions, which lack the conscience and severity of a Murrow, Cronkite, or a Rather, and have shifted more and more towards soft news infotainment starring Katie Couric.
In the mid-50s, even the haughty Murrow was obliged to host “Person to Person,” an hour of ‘remotes’ featuring interviews with celebrities in their glitzy houses–which, on television, all were reduced to black-and-white interiors. Murrow despised the show, but its commercial popularity underwrote the investigative “See it Now.” In the film’s comic high point, Murrow discusses, in dead earnest, the marital prospects of the flagrantly gay showman Liberace–matching Straithairn, in the film’s studio set, with the actual kinescopes of the screaming-queen entertainer on location at his mom’s Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles) home.

“Capote” (USA/Sony Pictures Classics) is an impeccable independent film. It’s a triumph not only of uncanny characterization, by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role, but of true producing brilliance by Hoffman in putting together his cinematically inexperienced chums from boyhood, Bennett Miller (director) and Dan Futterman (writer).
The film is based on Gerald Clarke’s entertaining biography of Capote, and turned into a scintillating study of a brilliant writer who alienated everyone, as well as himself, in the course of writing his masterpiece, “In Cold Blood.”
I don’t fully buy the premise that Capote’s literary triumph inevitably contained the seeds of his downfall, which is the schematic view of both the Clarke biography and the film. Yet that irony is a perfectly workable premise. I think that Capote’s alcoholism–along with his recreational drugs, Studio 54 dissipation, and the desertion of his jet set friends (after his vicious betrayal of them in “Answered Prayers”)–played equally significant parts in Capote’s falling apart and failure to complete another major work.

In “Capote,” we first see Truman alienate his gal pal and research associate, novelist Harper Lee (the eloquent Catherine Keener) by his monomaniacal blather after a screening of her “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He fails to even mention her success, so consumed is he by his own narcissism. Next, he deserts Perry Smith (the affecting Clifton Collins, Jr.), the confiding and dependent death-row inmate most prominent in “In Cold Blood.” (Truman identified with Perry because of their similarly wretched childhoods, and because he was physically attracted to this darkly attractive, though obviously unattainable man who possessed Capote’s own, small stature–even though Hoffman, himself, is no tiny tot.)
Capote fails to act to stay Perry and his partner’s death sentence because he needed them to be executed in order to complete his book. As he blows off all of his nearest and dearest, we begin to see the figurative noose tighten around Capote as well. He fails all of his friends while richly succeeding, artistically and commercially, with “In Cold Blood”–a damning title that earned Perry’s fury at Truman’s implicit indictment.

Hoffman, an unusual actor, is unafraid to be detestable, while Capote–like most actors–longed to be liked, if not adored.

Director Bennett Miller’s only notable previous directing credit is “The Cruise” (1998), a documentary about a motor-mouthed New York tour guide. I guess you could say that Capote, a conversational monopolist, was another motor-mouth, but this film is quite different and is far more accomplished than Miller’s documentary.
From the ominous opening shot of a raw wind whipping bare, snow-covered wisps of winter wheat in Kansas–leading up, ominously, to the site of the Clutter house, where the murders occurred–the precise note has been struck. (For reasons of economy the production used locations in Canada’s Alberta rather than in Kansas.)

Dan Futterman, the screenwriter, is a stage and screen actor, perhaps best known as the marrying son of the flaming Robin Williams character in Mike Nichols’ “The Birdcage.” The film portrait of Capote was Futterman’s idea. He wrote the script entirely on spec. The film marks Futterman’s notable debut as a screenwriter, and he had the smarts to send it to a friend who could impersonate Truman to perfection, although Hoffman is neither gay nor effeminate nor short.
Comparable to the great American actors Jason Robards, Jr. and George C. Scott, Capote ultimately lost his groove in oceans of booze. Philip Seymour Hoffman attributes his own success to his rehabilitation from all intoxicants at age 22 (he’s now 38). However, he was accused in The Times’ gossipy “BOLDFACE” of possibly being under the influence at the National Board of Review’s January gala–perhaps because he kept repeating the names of his mother and the woman he lives with, who has born him a son, aged 3.
Hoffman richly deserves his Oscar because character actors so rarely get to play the lead. Let’s face it, he is our finest actor, and Capote is his greatest creation.

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