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Lopate critiques George Clooney's new film, Good Night, And Good Luck. He says that Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck recreates one of the most dramatic chapters in television history. His new film is in black and white, and the decision to suppress color, however commercially risky, solves a multitude of problems. It permits the use of old kinescopes and news footage of hearings, and, more important, it allows one to see and hear the real Sen Joseph McCarthy.

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The theme of Good Night, And Good Luck., George Clooney's dramatic reconstruction of newscaster Edward R. Murrow's confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy, is nothing less than the responsibility of American network news to speak truth to power. This theme is so relevant to our present political agony that its timeliness-obviously intentional-risks overshadowing any discussion of the movie's aesthetic merits. For this reason, I would like to hold off on these political comparisons until later and analyze why I think it is such a singular, peculiarly austere piece of work for an American commercial film.

The quality of the movie issues as much from its avoidance of pitfalls (the triumphalism of liberal melodrama, the biopic's episodic attenuations, an art director fetishization of vintage props) as from its considerable achievements. This air of restraint is all the more remarkable in that Clooney's first directing effort, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, seemed crude, sophomoric, and slapdash in its satiric approach to the recent past and the television medium.

His new film is in black and white, and the decision to suppress color, however commercially risky, solves a multitude of problems. It permits the use of old kinescopes and news footage of hearings, and, more important, it allows us to see and hear the real McCarthy. It is one thing to get an actor (David Strathairn) to play the buttoned-down newscaster Murrow, and quite another to come up with a credible impersonation of the flamboyantly larger-thanlife senator from Wisconsin, who almost seemed to relish an oily, demonic self-mockery, with his inimitable, rasping, insinuating voice and forelock bobbing from a balding dome. Clooney makes a smart decision and shows us only archival footage of McCarthy. The fact that the two men fought each other through the media, and never squared off in the same room, is accentuated by the many shots of Murrow watching his adversary holding forth on a tv monitor. Even more frequent are shots of the telejournalist in profile, counterposed against monitors showing his face from a different angle: just as Douglas Sirk employed mirrors to suggest how fractured and self-alienated his characters were, so Clooney uses monitors to multiply his protagonist's images as an indication of self-unease.

Robert Elswit's sure cinematography eschews high contrast, giving us instead a spectrum of gray tonalities that match the grainy texture of the kinescopes and pick up the smudged, smoky swirls of that unapologetically nicotine-addicted era. The Fifties themselves have often been characterized as a gray period, morally a "scoundrel time" and sartorially (gray flannel suits) conformist. The film emphasizes that limited palette, letting glints of courage or integrity shine forth the more splendidly from a neutral corporate milieu. Often the ostensible light source, such as a desk lamp, is placed within the frame, casting half of Murrow's face in shadow. At other times, characters' features are flattened under fluorescents. No interior is warmed by sunlight.

Artificial light underscores the fact that there is not a single exterior in the film. The filmmakers have made a conscious decision to restrict the number of locations as much as possible. I counted only seven: 1) the CBS studios, a muzzy warren of bullpens, smaller offices, hallways, and broadcast studios through which the camera often darts and flits in mobile shots; 2) the Boss's office upstairs, decorated, with impeccable Fiftiesmodernist taste, in teak woods and non-objective paintings, as befit the man, William S. Paley, who served on MoMA's board for years; 3) the bar where the see It Now staff goes to unwind; 4) a hotel ballroom where Murrow receives an award in 1958 and gives a speech warning of the increasing vapidity of television (the film's framing device); 5) the apartment of Joe and Shirley, two staffers who live there in clandestine conjugality (no CBS News employees were allowed to be married to each other in those days); 6) the lobby of a government building, where Joe encounters a stooge of Senator McCarthy; 7) the apartment of newscaster and Murrow protégé Don Hollenbeck, shown for 10 seconds as he turns on the gas and sits calmly and suicidally watching television.

The restriction of locations dovetails with the film's structure, a limited set of dramatic configurations that recur with variations: the group meetings preparing for a program, the tense on-the-air process, the tête-à-têtes between Murrow and his bosses or underlings, the after-hours unwinding. It's no accident that only two locations feature private space: Good Night, And Good Luck, is a film about work. Unlike most American movies, which gravitate toward romantic dreams and weekend leisure, it keeps a tight focus on the struggle between Murrow's staff and McCarthyism. Since Americans bring so much of the best and deepest in them to their work, this particular film's single-minded emphasis on the workplace promotes a salutary redress. Murrow's wife and son are mentioned but never shown onscreen-nor, wisely, I think, is any attempt made to get behind the man's professional persona, which is compelling enough. We learn in passing that Murrow's producer, Fred W. Friendly, is Jewish, loves Christmas, and lives in Riverdale but, beyond that, discover nothing that is not contained in his work demeanor. (Clooney himself plays Friendly, and has himself photographed in a resolutely non-movie-star manner as Murrow's cohort and sounding board.) The two have moments of splendid rapport, as when Friendly, hiding under the table, taps Murrow's leg the moment he is supposed to speak on-camera, or when Murrow says, "I can always tell when you're lying to me, Fred: you light my cigarette." They function as a kind of couple.

The film has two subplots, the sketchier of which features Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson as secretly married staffers, the only characters afforded a private life. Since Downey and Clarkson are such attractive and able performers, their scenes together are never less than winning. Yet their period-specific dilemma, presumably intended to echo or complement the tensions at the heart of the narrative, seems superfluous, not unlike those glimpses of the outside world meant to "open up" cinematic adaptations of beloved plays.

Much more compelling is the subplot involving Don HoIlenbeck, brilliantly played by Ray Wise as a weak, self-pitying character in awe of Murrow, whose big-brother protection he craves. When Hollenbeck finds himself under attack from the right-wing columnist Jack O'Brien because of past left-wing activities, he pleads with Murrow to go after O'Brien. Murrow sensibly tells him that he cannot take on both the U.S. Senate and the Hearst newspaper empire simultaneously. We see Strathairn, as Murrow, repressing an instinctive dislike of the cringing Hollenbeck while gently attempting to instill the man with courage-his own courage, which the underling will never have. And when Hollenbeck kills himself, Strathairn's complicated face reflects the guilt and despair that haunts him for not doing more.

Certainly, Strathairn's performance is the film's anchor, and he does a magnificent job, a tour de force of nuance and controlled tension. Since I remember the real Murrow coming into our homes, I can testify that Strathairn is close enough, though not a ringer, physically or emotionally, for the man he portrays. Strathairn's Murrow seems more on the edge, about to blow at any moment; the Murrow I remember was a little more poker-faced, basset-hound stoical. For instance, there is a hilarious scene in which Murrow, forced to wear his other hat as congenial interviewer for his show Person to Person, asks the pianist Liberace, who is living with his mother, "Have you given much thought, Lee, to getting married and settling down?" The real Liberace, in kinescope, responds with wonderfully airy nonsense about not having met the right woman, though Princess Margaret interests him; then a close-up of Strathairn, cheek twitching in telegraphed recognition that he knows he is being lied to by his gay interviewee. The real Murrow would never make it so obvious that he felt soiled lending his talents to celebrity blather; he could play that game calmly and coolly when he needed to.

But perhaps in a feature film we don't have enough time for such double masquerades; we need to read the protagonist clearly, and Strathairn's Murrow is lucid and internally consistent from the get-go. He always acts morally, with dignity and enough humor not to be a prig. Still, the film takes a chance by not making him more of a "mixed" character. He's a hero in the agony of noble action, and if the film gets away with such a white-hat protagonist, it is partly because Strathairn gives a very Henry Fonda performance (virtue absorbed in a wary, self-mistrustful, standoffish vigilance that doesn't invite audience merger) and partly because the story is finally less about Murrow than about the historical procedures of a "network" (in the fullest sense). The staff's frequent overlapping dialogue helps convey that sense of collective effort.

Murrow is also given a remarkable foil in the character of William S. Paley. As played to perfection by Frank Langella, this worldly, elegant employer, absolutely no fool, would also like to do the right thing, morally, but does not want to see the network he has so lovingly created injured in the process. Their confrontations (filmed in stern shot/counter shot, for the most part) are classic standoffs of equal force, a competing impatience between two shrewd professionals. The last confrontation, probably the best-written scene in the movie, has you rooting for both men at once, or at least sympathizing with each point of view-until Paley finally pulls the plug on Murrow and says he is moving his news program from Tuesday night to Sunday afternoon and cutting it down to five shows. The result feels eerily inevitable; this time Strathairn's Murrow responds with well-tempered stoicism rather than short-fused anger.

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A mournful tone holds sway throughout the film, which is surprising given the narrative's potential for Norma Rae-ish exultation. After all, Murrow gets the better of McCarthy, U.S. Army counsel Joe Welch has his big moment, and McCarthyism is defeated. Yet all of that political esprit, as represented by the youthful see It Now staff whooping up their victories, seems hollow in the end, like college kids who still don't know the score, and their joy is undercut by the shots of Murrow or Paley alone in the studio at night-the two equated by their solitary burdens-as well as by a bluesy, downbeat jazz score that overrides the soundtrack during those scenes of triumph. The African-American singer Dianne Reeves, standing in as a kind of Fifties amalgam of Billie-Dinah-Ella-Sarah, has no fewer than five numbers punctuating the movie, and these songs ("TV Is the Thing This Year," "I've Got My Eyes on You," "You're Driving Me Crazy," "How High the Moon," and "Straighten Up and Fly Right") comment sardonically on the unfolding drama, somewhat in the manner of Brecht-Weill musical interludes. They also articulate a more straightforward sadness than these uptight white men can bring themselves to voice on their own. And that too is very Fifties, when modern jazz captured the temper of the times as much as did the burgeoning Madison Avenue culture (lightly satirized here in ads for Alcoa and Kent cigarettes).

The film's lingering melancholy is clearly meant as a commentary on our own situation, as if to say: all those battles were fought and dragons slain, and now we're back where we started, with the Patriot Act, Muslim-Americans being held in jail without evidence, and Jim Lehrer called a traitor for showing dead American soldiers in Iraq. And indeed, my first response on seeing this film was to feel acutely ashamed that our media has not been more outspoken in challenging the "weapons of mass destruction" charade by the Bush White House, or confronted more strenuously his economic and environmental policies. How one longs for an Edward R. Murrow to take on these iniquities!

Murrow is shown typing away at night on a manual typewriter. Unlike many news personalities today, he wrote his own material and took pride in his prose style. Indeed, part of our fascination as we listen to Murrow's on-air rhetoric is that it is so ostentatiously literary, with diction such as "insofar as" or "rather precisely." It is a formal language meant first to be written down, then read aloud, for an audience that could still delight in witty turns of phrase, alliterations, and Senecan concision. The screenplay is very adept at transmitting traces of this formal starch in Murrow's offhand dialogue, as when he counterattacks Paley: "I would submit that we have done very well by one another." Strathairn beautifully conveys Murrow's own self-awareness of the anachronistic comedy embedded in such terse, restrained locutions.

Hard to imagine a newscaster today getting away with this lofty, self-consciously educated tone. How did even Murrow get away with it, one wonders. The film lets us see that his authority derived in part from the "This Is London" dispatches he filed via radio during the Battle of Britain. The American public would listen to him because they knew he had been under fire. But they would also listen to him because he was a writer who, as in the Chinese character for honesty, "stood behind his words." If there is a Lost World being invoked by this sad-toned movie, it is the one in which written language still had a significant role to play in the oral/visual culture of its day. Clooney, who co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov, has attached himself here to that notion of literate seriousness.

But he also seems to be making a political point about language, which may have relevance to our present crisis. Avoiding ideological constructions of both Right and Left, Murrow appears able to commandeer the rhetorical middle ground of decency (Welch's famous cry, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" is shown in a video clip). When Murrow says to his staff, "If none of us had ever read a dangerous book, or had a friend who was different-well, we'd be just the kind of person Senator McCarthy wants us to be," he is speaking decency's language. When he warns on the air not to confuse "dissent with disloyalty," he is invoking American democratic ideals and recalling his passive audience to that civic path. When he says that, though he is not a socialist, he believes in "the clash of ideas," what that means, in dramatic terms, is the news commentator's high-minded, Athenian, Fourth of July speech as it collides with McCarthy's radio-trained, sniping, religious-martyr oratory about left-wing traitor "jackals." (There is an interesting moment in the elevator when Paley says that McCarthy had wanted to send William F. Buckley in his place to rebut Murrow's show on the air, but Paley turned down the request. All who remember Buckley's sneering syntactical convolutions will appreciate what a Thucydidian/Ciceronian duel that would have been!)

In appropriating the middle ground of American decency, Murrow had this advantage we don't have: he could respond not only to McCarthyism but to a recently vibrant Left movement that, though chased into hiding by the Cold War, left a moral pressure to reverberate on the scene. Today, our Left is too feeble and in disarray to be prosecuted as Communist; rather, it faces the danger of being totally ignored.

Still, Clooney's snug recasting of Cold War issues as a simple matter of decency versus intimidation fudges the film's politics. We never do learn whether Murrow was a member of a Communist front organization involving international education in the Thirties, as McCarthy claimed, though we hear him deny in high dudgeon that he was an iww member. To what degree was Murrow's "taking sides" dictated by his own personal politics? What, for that matter, are Clooney's specific politics? What does he make of the influence of Stalinist Russia on the American Left at that time, and whether it held any possible danger or was entirely illusory? We are left with a moody, elegiac regret for a passing titan, and no clear sense of how to get out of our current mess, except to stand tough and be prepared to follow heroes of sober integrity. Maybe the message of this very decent film is that those days are over.

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