Word: murrow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could just as well be talking about the emotional palette that he uses to bring CBS News broadcaster Edward R. Murrow to life on screen. Strathairn’s performance never strays outside of the solemn professionalism of Murrow’s broadcasts, whether or not the film’s television cameras are running...
...person, Strathairn has plenty to say about the cable-based infotainment circus that has succeeded Murrow’s straight-forward, hard-hitting network news broadcasts. “If Murrow was this crystal ball, you just dropped it and it’s shattered,” he says. “There are pieces of it everywhere, but they pick up a different light…The press has just been spun and pressed and squeezed and embedded...
Strathairn says his distaste for today’s complacent news media gave his performance as Murrow “a bit of despondency…a bit of ruefulness...
Disappointingly, director George Clooney's movie about Murrow is, at best, unimposing. Focusing on Murrow's conflict with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose campaign against an alleged domestic communist conspiracy redefined (at least until recently) political cynicism in the U.S., Murrow (well enough played by David Strathairn) becomes in the film a chain smoker in a suit, making pretty, unexceptionable speeches in support of the First Amendment. They are unshadowed by doubt or fear or, indeed, any sense of what made Murrow and his producer, Fred Friendly (whom Clooney plays), such virtuously embattled figures. The movie's appeal...
Maybe in this dark time, we need an earnest liberal fairy tale to remind us of our better, more tolerant selves. But there is more to the intertwined stories of Murrow and McCarthy than this simpleminded, rhetorically driven movie begins to encompass...