My father was born in 1935 and my mother in 1946. Both of them would tell me stories about McCarthyism when I was growing up. My mother’s stories mostly came from what her parents told her but my father has vivid memories of what happened during the time that this film covers. For years, he would start ranting if anyone brought up Senator McCarthy (or Roy Cohn…good Lord don’t ever mention Roy Cohn’s name in front of my father). So I’m not totally ignorant of what went on but I never really researched the part that Edward R. Morrow played in McCarthy’s downfall.
While I’d love to see a film about Morrow’s entire life (I’ll have to track down the HBO film Morrow which I think I saw when it first came out but have little memory of it), it was a brilliant idea to have a film focus on this specific time in Morrow’s life given the impact it had on the entire country. It’s an odd film in that character development is practically non-existent. You get an idea of everyone’s character in the first five minutes and the rest of the film is focused on their singular desire to take down McCarthy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it gives the film a quicker pace and pulls you in as if you’re one of them. Filming it in black and white worked well for me too since the real-life clips of McCarthy fit seamlessly into the film that way.  At 100 minutes George Clooney took the perfect amount of time to make his point without making the film drag on. It’s a credit to his directing, his writing and the actors that I got so lost into the movie.
The moment it was over, I wanted to talk about it. I wish I had seen it in the movies with someone so I could have talked their ear off about it. David Straithairn was absolutely brilliant….and George Clooney was, well he was George Clooney and that’s never a bad thing.
100 minutes well spent. There haven’t been enough good films in my group over the past week but this one made up for that.