Good Night, and Good Luck

David Strathairn, as broadcaster Edward Murrow, turns in a performance of masterful mimicry.

Herald rating: ***

A black and white film about journalism - or more particularly about a historic episode in American journalism - is more likely to excite critics than audiences, one fancies. And American critics have been almost unanimously ecstatic in their praise of this film that recreates the clash between CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and the red-baiting bully, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

At this distance - geographical and cultural - it is, perhaps, less compelling. Clooney's film (his second as director) feels like a social studies class, an earnest act of service to a legend, which never manages to find an overarching dramatic - much less moral - purpose.

It is a film of very solemn moral intent. It's bookended by a speech Murrow gave in 1958 in which he intones about journalism's higher duties, a none-too-subtle instruction as to what we should be thinking about in the hour that follows that lends it a sententious and slightly hectoring tone.

Then we're pitched into the events of the six months beginning in October 1953 as Murrow, a newsman who helms a top-rating news show, See It Now, takes on the case of a serviceman who has, on the basis of undisclosed evidence, been discharged from the Air Force.

Murrow's stand infuriates McCarthy and precipitates a conflict that demands from his network both grace under fire and the courage of its star's convictions.

The rest is history, although if you don't know what happened, Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov aren't cutting you any slack. The film pitches the viewer in at the deep end with no explanation or historical context. The intention is to lend a dramatic immediacy to events but it's still starched and impersonal, like a museum diorama.

The action is confined to the studios and the film makes a fair fist of conveying the atmosphere of a newsroom under pressure, but the result is that the characters are cyphers. Downey and Clarkson, for example, play a married couple keeping their relationship secret because the company forbids liaisons between colleagues.

Their enforced silence is meant, one assumes, to reflect the anxiety of the age. But it's a false equivalence, because it's the crusading network, not the oppressive political machine, that's at fault here.

There's no denying that the film is a meticulous piece of production design and Clooney's decision to have McCarthy play himself by way of old video clips is an inspired touch since it makes him aloof and even more menacing.

Clooney does a good turn himself as Fred Friendly, Murrow's producer and, as Murrow, Strathairn, a regular collaborator of the independent film-maker John Sayles, turns in a performance of masterful mimicry.

But Clooney - a courageous and outspoken liberal in public life - never really moves us beyond that handsome restaging. Unless the film is trying to suggest that a bit of Murrowesque grandstanding in 2006 will address the vexed issue of the relationship between the mass media and the political oligarchy - and that would be a very simple-minded suggestion, indeed - it is little more than a good-looking piece of masterpiece theatre. For Americans.

CAST: David Strathairn, George Clooney, Robert Downey jun, Patricia Clarkson, Frank Langella

DIRECTOR: George Clooney

RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes

RATING: PG, adult themes

SCREENING: Rialto from Thursday