Good Night, and Good Luck

Aroview: An astutely-judged freezeframe of an important symbolic moment in 20th century American history, when CBS television presenter Edward Murrow (played here by David Strathairn) took on the infamously-muckraking US senator Joseph McCarthy in the Cold War 1950s.

Shooting in lustrous black-and-white, dir. Clooney concentrates mainly on the backroom network debates and paranoia, as Straitharn prepares his challenge to McCarthy's 'witchhunt' for suspected Communists, goaded and advised by his more cautious colleagues. Injecting a touch of genuine menace is the use of actual 1953 newsreels of McCarthy in action as he publically demolishes his various victims in true 'kangaroo court' fashion. Although finally the drama is rather slight, Clooney's elegant treatise on moral courage functions as a timely and effective riposte to the pervading shallowness of contemporary media.