"Good Luck with All That"

The moment the audience broke into applause at the end of George Clooney's Good Night and Good Luck, I knew that the right-wingers had won again. Not one person whose world view would actually be expanded by the film – which draws unmistakable parallels between Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunts in the 1950s and the Bush administration's orchestration of the "War on Terror" – had been in attendance.

Call it the Michael Moore effect: Either conservatives get the advance word on a movie from the right-wing's Mean Spleen Media Machine and skip it or they just aren't drawn to entertainment that seeks to enrich civic life by fostering open debate on political issues. Yes, that's unfair, but it seems increasingly hard to believe that movies like Good Night, The Corporation, or any of Moore's fare play (and thus preach) to anything but the same old progressive choir. It makes you wonder whether either group can claim a true tether to reality – addicted as they both are to their respective fairytales and adept as they are at simultaneously screening out those of the other.

It's a shame because those who pass on Good Night miss much more than a self-righteous civics lesson. Politics aside, Clooney has crafted a delicately layered and intensely personal drama that unfolds on a strictly human scale. Strong yet understated performances by an accomplished cast (headed by David Strathairn as Edward R. Morrow) create a sense of intimacy and community among the characters that, ironically enough, springs from the very privacy that McCarthy attacks. The characters trade and keep secrets, but their revelations don't alter their respect for one another. It's a difficult dynamic to communicate, but Clooney and his cast pull it off with seeming ease.

Good Night balances the warm intimacy of the performances with claustrophobic cinematography and an infusion of paranoia appropriate to the moment. Hidden demons and deceptions slither and curl through the set like the cigarette smoke that saturates every scene – unfurling and obscuring in one elegant motion: Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson) are secretly married, suspicions about Morrow's past surface and are never entirely dispelled, and CBS Chairman William Paley (Frank Langella) prowls the empty halls of the studio at night, searching his conscience over how much license he should give his star journalist. Casting the ever-sinister Langella (could there have been a better Clare Quilty?) constitutes a masterstroke in itself, and Clooney cashes in every chip as you wait for Paley to lose his nerve and betray Morrow and producer Fred Friendly (Clooney). The latent secrecy laced through Good Night's air provides the gas as Morrow and Friendly play with fire in challenging McCarthy.

The only person missing, in fact, is the junior senator from Wisconsin himself. Clooney decides to rely strictly on grainy stock footage for Joseph McCarthy's presence - turning him into an electronic specter that courses through the very cables that keeps CBS running. It's a clever and sinister trick, but the movie ultimately suffers for it. The absence of a human force behind McCarthy, when coupled with the claustrophobic sets and private dramas, diminishes the historical stakes of the events depicted in Good Night. Ultimately, the conflict struggles to break out of the confines of the studios, executive suites and the Senate hearing rooms and into the streets. In a story where history itself provides no decisive personal confrontation (Morrow and McCarthy trade taped attacks and rebuttals), Clooney could have used a flesh and blood McCarthy to break the film out of its own pressure cooker and drive his point home. Even in the horror movies that dominated the screen during that era, you eventually got to see the monster face to face at the end. Instead, the threat fades away and we're left with the feeling that there never was a monster after all.

One can hardly believe this was Clooney's intent; the Bush administration and its hawks are frighteningly real – as are the losses of civil liberties and of life and limb in Iraq. If however, you're going to try to convince the other half of the country of this...well...good luck getting them to come to your movie.