Rigorous and principled, George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is a curiously slight film for more reasons than the fact that almost a third of it is comprised of archival footage integrated semi-successfully into the story. It's a recreation of a very specific battle in a very specific war that resonates with our Patriot Act/Guantanamo Bay situation, and indeed, that's the target Clooney seems most interested in striking. But without a larger context (the sort that would have weakened its allegorical usefulness), the picture sets itself up as something as obvious as it is minor and feather-light. It's a professional, high-minded, and staid biopic is what I'm saying, a film that says what it says with the stark B&W cinematography of a Dr. Strangelove, but in its icy, humourless way, it's the same stark B&W cinematography of a Fail-Safe, too. It's close and under-populated--and even with so insular and finely-focused a spotlight, it contains at least two completely superfluous characters.

With a framing story set upon the occasion of legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) receiving a commendation in 1958 (an opportunity Murrow used to berate his colleagues for letting the standards of television journalism slip), Good Night, and Good Luck. focuses on the period during which Murrow took on Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his HUAC campaign to make Americans turn on one another--our last major period of fear and loathing. The more accurate term is probably not "focuses," however, as there isn't really a focus to the piece so much as this is an exercise in stark chiaroscuro at play in a minimalist, vaguely surreal 1950s television studio. Style is struggling to overcome substance, but the substance is so strong that it ends up in limbo, neither provocative nor stylish enough to inspire.

Although broached and tossed aside in the picture, a moment where Murrow and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney) wrestle with the question of whether or not it's healthy for a human being to be forced into the standard of journalistic objectivity provides for me the key to the text. Good Night, and Good Luck. (Murrow's trademark sign-off) is a film about people who aren't quite human anymore, driven by the demands of their profession to instinctively assume an aspect of unnatural objectivity. Thus when an issue like McCarthy's red-baiting anti-American patriotism rears its ugly, top-hatted head, it forces them into assuming unfamiliar aspects of passion. The hope of the film's allegory is that we'll wake up, eventually, to the possibility that sometimes there isn't another side of a grim story. Alas, it's an allegory that gives no reward in its deciphering. It's a film shot by termites in a terrarium, or an adaptation of that Ray Bradbury short story in which a little girl is locked away in a closet on the one day in a century that it rains: a peculiarly insulated tale with no recognizable humans in its cast, energized like robots in the Hall of Presidents to recite the dusty echoes of their most inspirational lines, frame their stock footage, and intimate that the guardians at the gate were then, as they are now, talking heads nursed at the glass teat who might, if given enough cause, one day awaken again to champion the things we truly believe in.

For however cloistered and "live theatre" is Clooney's Murrow biopic (and it bears mentioning that Clooney's last biopic, the Chuck Barris biography Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, is full of verve and fascination), at least it's not Tony Scott's almost literally unwatchable biopic of Domino Harvey, Domino. Ostensibly telling the tale of the titular model-turned-bounty hunter (Keira Knightley), Scott's joint begins with the hipster title card "Based on a True Story. . . Sort of" and goes downhill from there. Far from staid, the picture illustrates nothing but Brownian motion--shaking shit up real good and filming the results for two long hours to a parade of ironic pop songs and barely-heard snatches of dialogue written by someone I'd like to see do better than this, Donnie Darko creator Richard Kelly. Domino demonstrates no knowledge of how to tell a story, relying instead on Knightley's ability to sneer and swing nunchucks and Tony Scott's inability to leave any single frame of his film unprocessed. It looks not only like it's been bleach-bypassed to smithereens (for that Fincher feel), but also as though the camera's come loose of its crane and whipped around on cables like a firehose for a few hours.

Flashback to Domino as a little girl then forward to an interrogation conducted by Lucy Liu (the lighting is so ill-advised that nearly every close-up is a death's head of hollow eye sockets and weeping cheek bones) in what appears to be a bank vault, then to some point in-between as someone's arm is put up for collateral in a trailer park negotiation, then to a mob boss talking on a cell phone from the bottom of his swimming pool, and finally to Domino's lazy hardboiled voiceover--which brings the little girl back to punk rock. It's a lot like Jonas Akerlund's repugnant and identically unwatchable Spun: pretty girls playing at ugly in a picture more interested in tableaux than in coherence. Domino meets bounty hunter guru Ed (Mickey Rourke) at a seminar of sorts, but we've already met him in the future along with third wheel Choco (Edgar Ramirez), who has a crush on Domino but is "too shy to say so." (He also tends not to speak English, though he is subtitled for our benefit, I guess.) But Choco isn't too shy to strip down in a Laundromat and, after some Natural Born Killers stuff with murder, rednecks, and mescaline-tripping in the desert, we're too beaten into submission to try to figure out if Domino's coy takedown of Choco's manhood came chronologically before or after their slow-motion tryst.

Trying to describe the plot is the equivalent of just running along, giving a blow-by-blow of the calamitous editing tricks (rack focuses, whip pans, dumb zooms, handheld, you name it), mentioning that the mafia gets involved and a cameo by Dabney Coleman, and translating the half-subtitles that Scott started to do with the now-reserved-seeming Man on Fire. Meanwhile, Mickey Rourke skeezes around in the Mickey Rourke fashion, playing exactly the same role he played in Spun. (For all I know, and for all it matters, they spliced outtakes from that disaster into this one.) Domino, true to the toy that shares its name, is a series of set-ups and knock-downs strung together loosely by the promise that somewhere along the way Knightley's sure to take her top off, bless her heart. I suspect that the film is racist in its depiction of a trio of "sassy Black chicks" led by the insufferable Mo'Nique Imes Jackson, just as I suspect that the screenplay by Kelly is no good, but I'll be honest with you: Domino is impossible to judge in any useful way. It's like critiquing the relative merits of a scream delivered into a vortex: there's so much garble on the line that I can't comprehend even the gist of what's being expressed.-Walter Chaw

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GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
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the critic

Published: October 14, 2005