Pet Projects:
"Good Night, And Good Luck" and "Syriana"

Review by Adrian Hyland


The warning signs were there a few years ago: around the time of the release of his directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney gave a magazine interview in which he talked of his rise to Hollywood eminence and the position he found himself in as one of the elite group of actors who could get a film made through what is commonly known as 'star power'. It seemed refreshing because Clooney hadn't, and still hasn't, opened a film off his own back as an actor. His most commercially successful projects have been the ensemble pieces Ocean's Eleven and The Perfect Storm, and the minimal box-office returns of his other, star vehicle, movies suggested that Clooney must have been pretty smart to have risen so high within the Hollywood system. Certainly the collective groan that usually ensues when an actor announces he 'wants to direct' barely registered, and the magazine asked him if there was anything, with all this success and self-realisation going on, left for him to reach for? George's answer was as folksy as it was chilling: "Well…" he mused as he gazed out a window, "I don't got me no world peace."
Four years later and he may not have realised his dream, but the international critical and socio-political response to the release of Good Night, And Good Luck, his second film as director, suggests that Clooney's consensus-building ability is that of a consummate politician, and that his car lot charm and a seeming inability to offend could see him propelled sometime in the future into the White House, where he would presumably give up this filmmaking charade and get down to what he's seriously good at: bravado salesmanship in the pursuit of the greater good. Good Night, And Good Luck isn't a movie, it's a very slickly packaged set of good intentions, and it's innocuous; you walk out thinking "…and that was it?".

Edward R Murrow is regarded so highly within the American media community that he has been described as a 'patron saint' of his profession. Raised as a Quaker, he was a man of seemingly unbending principle and surety of purpose, and when his rooftop radio broadcasts from London during the Battle of Britain in 1939 brought him to national prominence, it was his first taste of a life that was to become progressively more high-profile. Subsequently he returned to America, where he turned his back on the vice-presidency of CBS to return to radio broadcasting; the resulting Hear It Now series eventually became TV's See It Now, the show credited with originating many of the traditions of television news. If ever there was a public battle for the soul of America, the duel that took place between Murrow and the communist-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy, in a series of See It Now telecasts in 1954, was it. That Murrow and his team triumphed is seen as crucial; with McCarthy shamed the fever he had provoked died away and sanity was restored to political life in the U.S.A. The episode had a reverberating effect on the way Americans see themselves, and it's undoubtedly a fascinating period and great dramatic material.

Or rather it would be, if George Clooney had realised that making a movie involves more than simply providing a sounding board for your lead character and lighting it nicely. Clooney's conception of Murrow is cardboard. David Strathairn's performance is beautiful (although it would be more beautiful if it contained some ugliness) but he's playing an idea, not a man. Clooney doesn't care if we get an insight into who this man was; he just wants to make sure we know what he stood for. No-one is as decent as Murrow is portrayed to be in this film (at least no-one dramatically interesting). The Edward R Murrow of the history books had sympathies and antipathies, a drinking problem, human passions and appetites that exist in all - well, most - of us, but this director's not interested in drama; he wants to set examples. And stylistically the film is so click-your-fingers suave, so unctuous, that it's impossible to believe that Murrow and his team of oh-so-seasoned, dry-as-a-highland-malt urbane sophisticates could ever really get worked up about anything. (These guys never laugh, they just chuckle). The whole experience is about as provocative as a massage, and there's something dishonest about a film - on this subject - that so conspicuously avoids the warts-and-all approach and instead seeks to finesse us: it just makes you angry.

Clooney establishes the tone right from the start, with balmy jazz on the soundtrack and the black and white camera tentatively probing amongst the patrons of what seems to be some kind of broadcast convention or awards ceremony. The camera lands on faces, we register them, then it smoothly moves on, and this continues until we start to recognize people: hang on, that's Robert Downey Jr! Look, it's Jeff Daniels! Ok… oh and there's George! Eventually the cast lines up for a photo, the flash bulb goes and it's clear that these people deserve whatever awards may be coming their way. We are made to feel as though we should already know them, that they represent us.

The problem with Good Night, And Good Luck is that it doesn't follow through, it doesn't go into that dangerous territory where we might learn what drives its protagonists, and so we just sit there, absorbing the details of their professional lives. We never find our way into the story of Murrow vs McCarthy by seeing ourselves represented in the strengths and, more importantly, the weaknesses of the people onscreen. Clooney and his co-screenwriter Grant Heslov ignore these tricky areas and instead structure the narrative around the word-for-word reproduction of Murrow's rhetoric. It's clear that they regard these telecasts as poetic, revelatory. Unless your idea of poetry is Abraham Lincoln you might disagree. Clooney has a TV sensibility; his penchant for over-stylisation can't disguise his lack of feeling for the complexities and possibilities of the movie medium, and his staging of Murrow's lambastes is such that David Strathairn really may as well be standing in a pulpit.

There's too much reverence going on here, and as immaculate an actor as Strathairn is, he's given too little to work with, because Clooney doesn't acknowledge the need for there to be more to Murrow than what we see in his broadcasts. What we see is 'fierce integrity', a 'sense of duty'… it's all abstract and we sit there admiring the man without recognising him. What did he risk? Who was he? We are asked to read between the lines to try and determine why the man and his team decided to "go straight at" McCarthy. Given that Clooney obviously holds the medium of television in high regard, wouldn't it have been interesting to learn about Murrow's newsman instincts, his journalistic prowess and his role within the development of television? There must have been more to this guy than his principles!

There is no sense of context in Good Night, And Good Luck, no sense of a society outside the walls of the television studio. I can't remember an exterior shot, and why is the film so stylised? The chiaroscuro of its lighting design, the liquid quality of its black and white camerawork and the Tim Burton-esque heightening of reality seem bizarrely inappropriate to the material. (Although Clooney the director calls attention to himself less than he did in his previous film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, an exercise in nihilism with which the former ER star appeared to view himself as the natural heir to Michelangelo Antonioni).

Of course the context that Clooney is really interested in isn't the America of the fifties. He's not looking back at that period with the eyes of an artist; he's looking at our current media climate with the eyes of a politician, and congratulating us on our outrage. Depressingly, there's no shortage of people willing to throw those congratulations right back at him. It's a backslapping apparatus of considerable facility, but as a piece of cinema Good Night, And Good Luck will come to be viewed in much the same way that we now view Michael Moore's films, a few years after the fact: as quaint, anachronistic and, in the end, lightweight. You can't help feeling that the people who enjoy being scolded by this movie are the ones Edward R Murrow was trying to protect us from.

Syriana, written and directed by Stephen Gaghan and starring Clooney, is the second of two high-profile recent releases from Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 Productions, and the publicity in some quarters has suggested that together the two films constitute Team Clooney's assault on middle American complacency. In fact the two films are very different. While the director of Good Night, And Good Luck seems to be writing us a prescription, the sensibility at work in Gaghan's kaleidoscopic international oil thriller is closer to that of a war photographer or a documentarian: this film-maker doesn't deal in resolution, he takes snapshots of chaos and confusion and lets them reverberate. And Clooney, as a crapped-out CIA agent exploring various forms of oblivion, delivers the bravest performance of his career; his first loser.

Clooney put on weight for the role of Bob Barnes, the government operative based on real-life agent Robert Baer's book See No Evil, and it worked. The heaviness gives him a pathetic, mortal quality, as though he might spring a bear trap at any moment, and the awareness and receptiveness Clooney naturally projects mean that he's very good at playing scenes involving danger. When Barnes is cornered, the actor brings out the most distinctive weapon in his armoury: the Clooney voice, and it's so reassuring, so worldly, that it gives the words of an assassin a sanity and a plausibility that makes them unusually threatening.

Syriana takes us all over the globe as it follows the game of cause and effect played by its many protagonists, all of whom are involved in the global oil industry in some way. Jeffrey Wright, in a head-turningly quiet performance, plays the corporate lawyer hired to facilitate the merger of two massive US oil companies. Matt Damon is a young broker whose warped idealism, following the death of his young son, leads him into a surreal desert-bound alliance with an Arab prince, played by Alexander Siddig, and a Pakistani teenager, Mazhar Munir, laid off from the gulf oil fields when the American merger goes through, finds himself recruited by an Islamic cleric. Gaghan's vision, though, coalesces best around Bob Barnes, the man who has avoided ties to anything, yet gradually discovers himself to be at the heart of a global conspiracy.

As he did in his screenplay for Traffic, Gaghan constructs several storylines that run alongside one another throughout the film. He writes short, businesslike scenes that intrigue as much by withholding information as by providing it, and in Syriana Gaghan the director knits the scenes together by cutting away, usually earlier than expected, to another continent where a different cog in the wheel of his screenplay is turning. It's pretty masterful, but as was the case with Traffic the editing seems designed to smooth our journey so there are no emotional peaks and troughs along the way; it's like cinematic cruise control.

There are moments of poetry though: Gaghan captures the awe an anal young American might feel when confronted by the Arabian desert, and there's poetry in the way Clooney moves, and in his lost quality. Gaghan's sense of curiosity about the world around him carries us with him from country to country, but when he aims for pathos his TV roots betray him: the Pakistani father soliloquising about the snow on the mountain-tops is just embarrassing, and Jeffrey Wright's drunkard father is a character I felt I'd seen many times before.

It's a hard film to get enthused about, because the way Gaghan has structured the story there's such an overwhelming imbalance on the scales of justice that there'd simply be no point in anyone trying to do anything about the issues being raised. Anyone with a soul is a loser when confronted with the faceless evil that is corporate culture. It's understandable that someone of Gaghan's ambition and rigour would want to make a film exposing high-level corruption in the oil industry, and he's succeeded in taking us to places rarely visited by the cinema, but Syriana is too cerebral; you sit there thinking 'that's outrageous… surely they can't get away with that!', but you don't move in your seat. The anger, the fervour that must have been there at this project's inception seems to have evaporated out there in the desert.

— Adrian Hyland is a freelance writer and editor based in London.