Introducing the Guilties!

"Good Night, and Good Luck"

Message: Television can speak truth to power or lull us with mindless pap. If we lose faith in popular journalism as a last line of defense against demagogues and autocrats, we're in deep ... whoops! Too late!

Signature moment: As payback to the network for his hard-hitting attacks on Joe McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) must interview Liberace from his home in Las Vegas. "Have you given any thought to getting married and settling down, Lee?" he asks. Lee assures Ed he's just waiting for the right girl.

Comments: I found "Good Night, and Good Luck" an exquisitely made motion picture, tremendously compact and assured. But, hey, it begins and ends with Murrow delivering a jeremiad on the evils of television to an audience of half-soused New York media insiders, and if that doesn't make it a strong contender for the Guilty, then nothing is. As with Sam Rockwell in the underappreciated "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," George Clooney takes a career character actor (Strathairn) and thrusts him into the limelight with spectacular results. In many respects "Good Night" is a mournful lament for a bygone age when television could still support an erudite crusader like Murrow. On the other hand, the struggles Murrow faced getting his McCarthy indictments on the air seem strikingly familiar, and he was widely derided by right-wingers as a commie pinko traitor and eventually dumped to Sunday afternoons, even by supposedly urbane CBS. This is a retreat from the vibrant eccentricity of "Dangerous Mind" into the far more familiar territory of a liberal Sunday-school lesson about democracy. Maybe we need more of those right now, but I'm not sure they do any good. The best things here lie elsewhere: the delicious black-and-white cinematography, the sheer eloquence of Strathairn as Murrow, the confident performances of Clooney, Robert Downey Jr., Patricia Clarkson, Ray Wise and a host of others.

"Munich"

Message: Violence begets violence. An eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. Oh, and: Dad? Where are you, Dad?

Signature moment: Israeli secret agent Avner (Eric Bana) boffing his wife in their Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment while horrific images of the Munich 1972 massacre scroll through his mind.

Comments: I found "Munich" a great surprise, and I mean that in a good way. Like virtually every Steven Spielberg movie, it's a fable about a damaged family more than anything else -- and like many of his later films, it's about a lonely child who has grown up into a wounded and inadequate father. But it's also a compelling political thriller full of excitement, character and incident. And it depicts, I think, a fascinating moral quandary. Unlike some critics, I don't see confusion or compromise or condescension (or, for that matter, liberal guilt) in Spielberg's approach to Munich and its aftermath. There is no question, in terms of history or ordinary human emotion, that the Israeli government was justified in seeking the deaths of those who planned the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question in "Munich" is whether those acts of vengeance, and others like them, were worth it. Did they demand too much from men like Avner, from Israel, from all Jews? Did they harden the hearts of people on all sides, and gradually poison the world's attitude toward the Middle Eastern conflict? Many people have assumed that to ask these questions is to answer them, and that Spielberg (or screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth) have somehow adopted a squishy-hearted left-wing sympathy for murderers who happen to be Palestinian. I don't see it that way at all. "Munich" simply reminds us that justification does not equal justice, and that we can never know where other paths might have led. We can only see where we are now, and like Avner, we are damaged and estranged from each other, sick of the killing but unable to stop it.

And the winner of this year's Liberal Guilt Award is ... well, you tell me. I've got "Crash" -- all it needs is a personal appearance by a multi-culti Jesus to be the largest dose of didactic sermonizing ever made in Hollywood -- with "Good Night, and Good Luck" a distant second. Will we be back with another case of the Guilties next year, or will Hollywood have purged its conscience and moved, with cyclical certainty, back to cynical, prepackaged fun? I know we're all dying to find out.

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