Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,89

Paltrow is to remember her antecedent and follow her example. There is a way out of the princess gig. Grace Kelly cracked it in High Society and Rear Window. Paltrow glimpsed it in Emma, which was, in truth, the role that deserved an Oscar. Keep the vulnerability, but don’t be coy about the self-possession that is so obviously there. He goes down on his knees because you have something of value—and you know it. And if he left, you’d survive. Grace Kelly proved that princesses have power, too.

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK AND CASANOVA

First, a disclaimer. With regard to Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney’s strident political docudrama, I find myself in a difficult position. I watched it and liked it. Then I spent two hours on the Internet and changed my mind.

What remains is still the review I intended, but it is qualified by the obvious fact that liberal films like this are made to please liberals like me. In terms of historical content, the film is neither quite honest nor quite true. That’s a shame, because it’s a good film. I don’t have space to discuss the several disappointing inaccuracies, elisions of fact and deliberate obfuscations. All I can do is direct you to the Internet and to Joseph E. Persico’s 1988 biography Edward R. Murrow: An American Original. What follows, then, is a glowing review of a fine piece of agitprop leftist cinema, which I very much enjoyed in the same spirit a person of the opposite sensibility will enjoy Ann Coulter’s recent celebratory defense of McCarthyism, Treason, not because it is entirely true but because she’s fighting in your corner. Clooney’s fighting in mine, and doing it in style.

And how. This is a beautifully made, superficially coherent, effective movie, and you have to pinch yourself to believe an actor directed it, wrote it and produced it. The generosity of the ensemble casting, the control of the heavily verbal material, the expert pacing—it is a mature work. Clooney understands that style is what you leave out, and in its taut ninety minutes he leaves out so much of what we have come to expect that Warner refused to fund the film. He left out the color. He left out the subplots. He left out the love interest. He sidelined historical reenactments in favor of the real thing: archive footage.

What remains is strongly reminiscent of Citizen Kane, not simply for its loquacious, crusading journalists, but because it is both visually luscious and aurally self-sufficient. You could close your eyes and understand everything. But don’t close your eyes. Here in sumptuous black and white is a perfectly recreated Capraesque newsroom. Here are quick-fire conversations à la Pres ton Sturges. The period detail is given a kick in the pants by the witty camera work (borrowed from Soderbergh and the Coen brothers), shooting faces from below, zooming in on a finger worrying a shirt button.

Clooney himself avoids the camera, slinking through the film as unobtrusively as a star can. In a film that is about editorializing and is itself heavily editorialized, Clooney edits himself out for the sake of the material. Into the Clooney-shaped hole slips an accomplished ensemble cast—Tate Donovan, Reed Diamond, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson—all of whom back up David Strathairn’s pitch-perfect Murrow impersonation by being entirely convincing newshounds. Well, all but one. I think you know who I’m talking about. Mr. Downey remains the most aggressive scene stealer in Hollywood. He’s barely restrained here, but if someone doesn’t give him free rein soon, there’s a danger of auto-combustion.

I digress. Like Murrow—the campaigning television broadcaster who squared off against Senator McCarthy in the mid-1950s—Clooney uses the “wires and lights” of his medium to make simple, forceful arguments. His case against McCarthy is familiar and correct: the paranoid fervor of McCarthyism placed the right to fair trial and the rights of the First Amendment under serious threat. Today, these rights are endangered once more. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home,” argues Murrow in 1956, foreshadowing our present concerns. Clooney doesn’t have to push hard for analogies like this—they’re everywhere. In fact, they’re a little too easy, and so admiring is he of Murrow that he follows his hero’s editorial style to the letter. (Clooney has always seemed boyishly prone to masculine hero worship, from his consecration of his own newscaster father to the re-creation—both on- and offscreen—of Sinatra’s rat-pack heyday.) Just as Murrow gave McCarthy enough rope to hang himself by