The flickering witness of the film is to not try to state this in so many words, other than via Murrow's famous speech. Instead, it makes a filmic allegory of television by offering us a vision of human faces, an anatomy of old, squat, dumb, feckless, neutral, indefinable, normal, indefinably uninteresting visages - a semiotician's dream of the now-only-other of television (and movie) faces. It opens with these faces, before you even know the film is there, it broods, lingers on face after face, 50's faces, poorly lit, blotchy, strangely unlike the faces the camera - any camera known to us - is supposed to be worshipping. Faces of the uncool, parents, teachers, functionaries who are now mostly dead. The hopelessly rebarbative generation in dull wardrobes before things got interesting, before color, before Kerouac, before Bobby Darin, before.
Before we get to what went wrong, where, how, why, with television, we get to see what people looked like before television made them look like Liberaces who, having flunked piano, turned to making a living and chattering...
Coupla years ago, Tom Matrullo reviewed a Dylan concert in around 150 words. I felt as though I'd been there. Last weekend, awaiting Wilma's arrival, he sat down to Good Night, Good Luck. The resulting 750-or-so words are way too good to miss. So, apparently, is the film.
