Film: Good Night & Good Luck, Syriana

Good Night & Good Luck (dir. George (looney, 2005) Syriana (dir. Stephen Gaghan, 2005) Reviewed by Thomas Kollmann he past five years have seen a raft of polemical documentaries making headlines, the most high profile being Chavez-Inside the Coup (Kim Bartley, Donnacha O' Briain, 2003) and Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004). Alongside these have been some unusually political Hollywood films. Two of these have just hit British screens, Good Night & Good Luck and Syriana, both starring George Clooney and produced by Participant Productions, a company whose stated aim is to raise awareness of topical issues and encourage activism. Good Night is shot in black-and-white and set almost entirely within claustrophobic1950s corporate office interiors. George Clooney, who directed and co-wrote the script with producer Grant Heslov, tells a tightly paced story exploring professional ethics that pits Edward R. Murrow, the US newsman who gained fame as a reporter in London during the blitz, and his producer Fred Friendly (Clooney), against the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy, who blithely ruined lives in electoral service for the Republican Party. David Straithairn superbly recreates Murrow's wooden mannerisms, while McCarthy appears in archival footage from his notorious Senate hearings and, a clip from his appearance on Murrow's programme, tersely reciting smears against Murrow. Goodnight is more successful and less convoluted than Syriana in making its political arguments. Clooney & Heslov are less interested in Murrow's role in McCarthy's downfall than suggesting that a culture of McCarthyism lives on and the mainstream news media are its principle victims. In a scene that bookends the story Murrow addresses a corporate function a few years after the main events, lecturing his colleagues on the need to prevent television from becoming a tool, "to distract, delude, denude, and isolate us'. REVIEW Syriana Stephen Gaghan's Syriana feels like a series of dramatizations of news items from the past few PIAN years: a suicide boat attack on a US ship; drone planes firing on suspect vehicles; intelligence analysts leaned on by hawkish government officials. The film is based on See No Evil, the 2002 memoir of CIA operative Robert Baer. The film's title refers to an idealized version of a Middle Eastern country constructed by US Government strategists. The filmmakers intended the story's woolly narrative and its character's hazy morals. The story begins in the Middle East, with CIA operative Bob Barnes (Clooney) having a somewhat unconvincing conscience when some of his arms merchandise is transferred to sinister buyers during a deal. In a nameless oil-rich state, a stand-in for Saudi Arabia, an ailing emir's two sons are both candidates for the throne. Charismatic elder Prince Nasir sets hidden wheels in motion by signing an oil deal with China. This has serious consequences for Barnes bosses; Houston-based oil corporation Connex oil, which held the drilling rights in the emirate; Nasir's rival for the thrown, rascally Prince Meshal and hundreds of Connex's laid off Pakistani workers. Two of these workers are recruited by Islamic fundamentalists represented by the recipient of Clooney's arms in the first scene. The recruiter explains to a class of these workers that Western societies are failing on their own terms, with privatization and neoliberalism cited as root causes. Nasir is an enlightened idealist. His vision for the kingdom, he explains to energy analyst Bryan Woodman (Matt Damon), includes women's rights, freedom of speech, and an independent judiciary. Meshal, meanwhile, ingratiates himself with Washington player Dean Whiting, (Christopher Plummer), a stand-in for George HW Bush power-broker James Baker. Whiting represents Connex, and employs inscrutable lawyer Bennet Holiday (Jeffrey Wright) to influence the Department of Justice and ensure that a related merger with a smaller oil firm goes through. Many reviewers have noted how Syriana's bleak tone recalls early 70s political thrillers, particularly Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View (1974) and Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975). Bryan Woodman's warning to Nasir about peak-oil theory in one scene even echoes a line from Condor, 'Today its oil, right? In ten or fifteen years food...Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?' There has often been a political dimension to Clooney's films when he was behind the camera. Three Kings (1999), for example, made some rare illustrations of what the US did during the first Gulf War. But neither of these films seem as perceptive or explicit in their criticism as their 70s predecessors about the US role in the world. Syriana, in particular feels like a checklist of conventional anxieties about the recent aggressive turn in US foreign policy. 29