A taste of another time

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2009)

George Clooney takes only a minor role in 'Good Night and Good Luck', his second film as a director, which from my perspective is a blessing; I definitely prefer him behind the camera, for the movie is an atmospheric invocation of another time, when journalists of integrity promoted cigarettes and the terrible Senator Joeseph McCarthy sought to ruin the lives of anyone who had even the faintest connection with communism. David Strathairn is excellent as Ed Murrow, one journalist who eventually took McCarthy on (although I have heard it said that he waited till the peak of his opponent's power had passed before striking), but who couldn't defeat the rise of television's relentless commercial ethic. As a film, it's not quite the equal of 'All the President's Men': telling only the story of McCarthy's downfall, we never quite get the sense of how mighty he was, or the true level of bravery involved in confronting him; and McCarthy is a man with whom it is quite impossible to sympathise from a modern perspective. But the effectiveness of Clooney's recreation of the 1950s means that it's a gripping tale, in spite of the relative weakness of plot.