Quick Review: Somehow understated and glorifying at the same time, it does a good job of making you feel like you learned the real story.

As you likely know, *[Good Night and Good Luck](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433383/)* tells the story of Edward R. Murrow’s TV journalistic challenges to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. And, uh, that’s really what it does. It only alludes to any of Murrow’s other work. It doesn’t have much in the way of subplots. It doesn’t feature long-winded diatribes on ethics anymore than it needs to. Indeed, Murrow doesn’t really seem all that heroic, at least not by Hollywood movie standards. He seems kind of… burnt out. I think that helped make the movie for me.

I mean, McCarthy doesn’t have a lot of supporters these days. Picking him as the antagonist for a movie is not really very sporting, or something. So, it’d be really easy, I think, to deify someone who has the courage to take him on. But, the filmmakers don’t go too far with that. Maybe it’s because they don’t need to, because hardly anyone is going to see this movie and feel like Murrow was doing the wrong thing. So, they just focus on what life was like inside the CBS building at the time.

And, what was it like? Smoky! Woah! I don’t know why they’d be overdoing the smoking, so I assume that they aren’t. Wow. If that’s anything like what it was like, I can hardly believe anyone from that generation is still alive. If this portrayal is accurate, then any member of that crew who didn’t smoke would surely still be injesting the equivalent of a pack a day just in second-hand form. I sure feel like I would hate that. I’m sure, at the time, I would have thought it normal, and probably would have smoked myself. But that’s hard to imagine. In any event, kudos to Clooney and his crew for not prettying up the scene.

Needless to say, I have no idea how accurate any of this was, from the smoking to the monologues. I think it was really great for them to use actual footage of McCarthy, and maybe that, coupled with the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, did a good job of creating credibility in my brain. Whatever the case, the film seems simple and true. While I won’t advise my friends to rush out and see it, I will advise them all to add it to their Netflix list in the future for an intelligent but not-too-heavy evening’s entertainment. And unless I’m being duped, that’ll be a historically educational evening as well.