Good Night, and Good Luck

As it was selected by the Academy as one of the five best movies of last year, I had high expectations for Good Night, and Good Luck. And while I wasn't disappointed, I wouldn't say I was particularly blown away, either.
Good Night, and Good Luck tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, the American journalist and broadcaster, and specifically his dealings with Senator Joseph McCarthy. If you read The Crucible in high school and had an English teacher with any merit, you probably learned about McCarthy. He was that guy from the 50s who called everyone who opposed him a communist, creating a "witch hunt" known as the Red Scare. Jim Carrey famously stood up to him in The Majestic, a significantly less historically accurate film.
And Good Night, and Good Luck is nothing if not historically accurate. In fact, much of the film is, in fact, history. McCarthy, for example, is played by himself, as director George Clooney decided--like Murrow's CBS news crew in the film--to allow McCarthy's bigotry and fearmongering speak for itself. It's a nice touch, as I'm certain any actor handed the McCarthy role today would be tempted to oversell it.
The acting in this movie is, by the way, superb. David Straitharn does a brilliant job as Murrow, earning an Oscar nomination in the process. Clooney also does a commendable job as Murrow's co-producer Fred Friendly, but highlighting individuals almost seems worthless in a cast that was uniformly stellar.
The film's failings, if they may be called that, perhaps are just a result of it not being quite ambitious enough. It's nothing more or less than a straight-up homage to Murrow and panning of McCarthy. The action seldom leaves the CBS newsroom--shot, like everything else, in black and white--and the film barely cracks 90 minutes. That's enough to tell the story and explore its characters, but it keeps it from becoming a truly epic film.
But perhaps that's for the better. Perhaps adding additional scenes, characters, and minutes to this movie would just dillute its message. Because as it stands, it's a firmly engaging little biopic, if maybe a bit too A&E.
Which means, on the 22 scale, it can only get a 10. But as that's all it really reached for, I don't think it can be too disappointed.