Before the Chatter

By Richard Schickel

Edward R. Murrow had a great voice--a sincere and authoritative baritone. His speech was formal and literate. He was a liberal in the great American tradition--less an ideologue than a champion of fair play and common decency. The first thought you have, watching Good Night, and Good Luck in the age of Limbaugh and O'Reilly, is one of intense nostalgia. By the standards of modern television--or even television in his time--Ed Murrow was an imposing figure.

Disappointingly, director George Clooney's movie about Murrow is, at best, unimposing. Focusing on Murrow's conflict with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose campaign against an alleged domestic communist conspiracy redefined (at least until recently) political cynicism in the U.S., Murrow (well enough played by David Strathairn) becomes in the film a chain smoker in a suit, making pretty, unexceptionable speeches in support of the First Amendment. They are unshadowed by doubt or fear or, indeed, any sense of what made Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (whom Clooney plays), such virtuously embattled figures. The movie's appeal is all in its style; its substance is all in its straight-to-camera lectures.

Shot in black and white, with a nice sense of how claustrophobic studio TV production was in its early days, it looks interesting and attractive enough. The lack of color allows Clooney to seamlessly integrate authentic footage of McCarthy and some of his victims into his story. You get a terrific sense of what a sneering, whining bully McCarthy was, an equally good sense of how utterly unthreatening his victims were. On the other hand, a film (or kinescope) clip is still just a clip. The figures are just images. They have almost no human interest--no motivating foibles or dark passions.

The one exception to that rule is the sleek and smoothly menacing Frank Langella, playing the founder and chairman of CBS, William Paley. It is quite wonderful to watch Langella slowly, slowly slip off his velvet gloves to reveal the mailed fists of media proprietorship. In those passages the movie achieves the melodramatic intensity--and a certain sophistication about the uses and abuses of power--that is nowhere else evident in it.

Maybe in this dark time, we need an earnest liberal fairy tale to remind us of our better, more tolerant selves. But there is more to the intertwined stories of Murrow and McCarthy than this simpleminded, rhetorically driven movie begins to encompass.