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'Good Night, And Good Luck' is good news

One measure of how much actor/director George Clooney idolizes legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow might be hard for some admirers to believe: When David Strathairn (as Murrow) shares the screen with him, the world's best-looking actor allows himself to disappear completely, while Strathairn (a handsome man himself, but come on) becomes something like a god.

Another measure of Clooney's obsession is that he trusts audiences to sit still for a movie with no action and that almost never ventures outside the offices of the CBS News. With co-writer Grant Heslov, he pays little attention to the artificial rise-and-fall of conventional story structure — he just puts people in rooms, has them talk to each other, and expects we are smart enough to be interested.

Warner Independent Pictures 'Good Night, And Good Luck' 4 out of 5 stars Director: George Clooney Starring: David Strathairn, George Clooney, Rose Abdoo, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson Run time: 90 minutes Release date: Oct. 7, 2005 Rating: PG for mild thematic elements and brief language. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'Good Night, And Good Luck'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

For all sorts of reasons, the gamble pays off.

There's the drama, for one thing, which despite not being normal movie fodder has the benefit of being highly relevant to thoughtful Americans. For an age in which so many citizens are less than trustful of the press, less than confident in our government and less than proud of television's role in culture, Clooney transports us to a moment at which a TV anchorman could straight-facedly aspire to doing good for the Republic.

Revolving around Murrow's 1953 decision to run an unflattering portrait of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (far from the first negative press McCarthy got, though as a TV broadcaster Murrow was both high-profile and especially vulnerable to government reprisal), the story pits the news team against military officials, witch-hunting politicians and even the owners of their own network. It also hints at the way news divisions were already seeing their educational goals overshadowed by the public's appetite for empty entertainment: In between news programs, Murrow must suffer through interviews with Liberace and the like on "Person to Person."

If its narrative cousin, in managing to make newsroom decisions dramatic, is "All the President's Men," "Good Night" is politically less like that film (which dealt with Watergate while it was fresh) than like "M*A*S*H," which critiqued current events by proxy. Korea stood for Vietnam as the Red Scare stands for today's attempts to paint dissent as anti-Americanism, or as a CBS executive who begs Murrow to kill his McCarthy story represents contemporary reporters who would rather let a politician's self-contradiction slide than embarrass him and lose access.

Politics and history aside, "Good Night" is a film of surprising sensual appeal. Photographed in rich black and white, it revels in smoke-filled newsrooms and crisp '50s wardrobe. It indulges frequent interludes from Dianne Reeves, whose jazz group saunters through standards in a studio down the hall. Most importantly, it savors Strathairn's intoxicating performance as a reporter whose resonant voice, gift for prose and (now unacceptable) way with a cigarette all but defined journalistic gravitas.