I just watched two stunning films on a long plane flight; both are part of Mark Cuban’s extraordinary new film company, which releases its movies simultaneously as downloadables, theatrical releases, DVDs, and video-on-demand titles.
The movies are Good Night and Good Luck and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and together, they make a powerful, moving statement about how good people do evil and how flawed people can do good.
Good Night and Good Luck is the story of journalist Edward R Murrow’s campaign to expose Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts for a sham aimed at grabbing power by instilling fear of shadowy bogeymen into America’s hearts. Murrow and his fellow campaigners are portrayed in great warts-and-all style, flawed people with a heartfelt disgust for the deeds of a wicked opportunist who is destroying everything they love about their country. Most compelling about this is the way that it attacks the dumbing-down of discourse, something that’s been in free-fall since before Murrow’s time and shows no sign of hitting bottom. Cinematically, this is a beautiful film, shot in black and white and seamlessly intercut with scenes out of McCarthy’s hearings, with spooky interstitial sequences of torchy jazz.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a straight-ahead documentary about the rise and fall of Enron. The Enron events took place over years, and it’s hard to remember sometimes just how high-flying these bastards were, and how much harm they wrought to millions, and how much they got away with. The filmmakers got astonishing on-camera interviews with insiders from a Portland linesman who lost his pension when Enron bought the state utility he’d worked for all his life to a senior Enron exec who left just before things went horribly wrong and who is visibly moved in discussing the suicide of one of her peers, who she describes as a good person, despite his participation in a shell-game that bankrupted tens of thousands of workers who lost everything in his shell-game.
Smartest Guys in the Room also makes brilliant use of news-footage, with genius cuts from the Congressional Enron hearings to corporate Enron booster films to newscasts to grainy, secret whistle-blower clips. And Smartest Guys also has a fantastic soundtrack most notable for its use of spooky Tom Waits songs like “Starving in the Belly of a Whale” and “What’s He Building Up There?” that have always struck me as soundtrack for a movie as yet unmade.
These two films tell you a lot about how good and evil are done. Smartest Guys shows you a parade of good and bad people who collectively did great wickedness (baby-faced traders bug-eyed with enthusiastic remembrance of the high-flying days of pump-and-dump) and Good Night and Good Luck shows you good people who refuse to do wicked, and who inspire others to follow their lead.
There are days when it’s hard to believe that the world will ever improve, that greed will ever be set aside for decency, but these films put a lie to it. I recommend watching them both, back to back, the next time your hope runs low.