Growing up at the movies found me wrestling producer Samuel Goldwyn’s pet phrase, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.” Doesn’t a movie have to say something to be good? This was at a time in my celluloid tutelage when To Kill a Mockingbird was the apex of cinema and incense burned round the clock for Ingmar Bergman. Mockingbird’s meaning-laden courtroom scenes now play like a long, second-act intrusion – give me more Scout and Atticus – and I’d be hard pressed to tell you the last Swedish death valentine I endured. And did I ever really champion John Ford’s preachy The Grapes of Wrath over his much more personal (and universally panned) knockabout comedy Donovan’s Reef?

What stronger significance is there than the one behind Charlie Kane’s Rosebud? A child growing up without love is doomed to spend a miserable adulthood, yet the audience doesn’t catch on until the final fade when the sled’s in the fire. Were that all Citizen Kane is about, it would hardly be worthy of its well-deserved “greatest film ever made” tagline. Not that every movie should (or could) live up to Orson Welles, but if all a filmmaker has to show for themselves is a well-crafted soapbox, particularly an overly-familiar one, send it FedEx overnight.

George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck and Niki Caro’s North Country are both built around two hot-button topics: government interference with personal freedom and the first sexual harassment class-action suit ever filed. Both films are based on true stories (almost never a good sign), and seek the safety of the past in which to place their timely narratives.

Directed by Niki Caro

Written by Michael Sietzman

Starring: Charlize Theron, Woody Harrelson, Sissy Spacek and Richard Jenkins

123 min. in CinemaScope

North Country has the makings of either a standard issue “Oprah Winfrey Show” or a mediocre two-hour Sunday night movie. Here is a basic stick figure melodrama that reduces all men to assholes and all women their victims. Charlize Theron stars as Josey Aimes, a single mother of two whose abusive boyfriend forces her to move in with her withholding parents. The script paints a reformed tramp who thinks Denny’s is the Ritz. While working at the local beauty parlor, Josey is reacquainted with high school chum Glory (Frances McDormand resurrecting Fargo’s “Yah, hey dere” Marge Gunderson). The town’s bustling iron mine provided employment for generations of male northern Minnesotans and Glory suggests that Josey could earn as much money as her father if she came and worked with her. As soon as Josey’s competitive dad catches wind of her new job, he quickly labels her a “lesbian,” a word his adorable granddaughter is quick to repeat in order to wring a tension-breaking laugh out of the initial family dinner scene. Palms quickly hydrated.

The debased clock-punchers in Waiting have nothing on these Neanderthals. As if dildos hidden in lunchboxes weren’t enough, these slobs have only three names for women and when they’re not using them as a form of greeting, they delight in spelling them out (in excrement) on the bathroom walls. Long before “Jackass” transformed imbecility into a cottage industry, these sadistic dolts thought nothing of overturning a Porta-San containing a female co-worker. (The temporary toilets are a prime source of contention for the women who, unlike their male counterparts, can’t unzip anywhere.) Not that I expected yokels with the time-tested scatological repartee of Howard Stern, but this stuff is sub-Benny Hill, thus rendering them all the more one-dimensional. Sadly, it’s not just the men who have heads made of rock. Beyond the fact that they need the job, why Josey’s female co-workers endure the humiliation and don’t see her as a ticket to freedom is never dramatized.

You know it’s an “important” picture if Sissy Spacek is in it, and as Alice Aimes she adds another mother-suffering-in-silence (In the Bedroom, Nine Lives) to her resume.(I miss the Sissy of Carrie and Badlands!) The film’s only decent penis-bearing character is Bill White (Woody Harrelson), a retired hockey player cum lawyer who acts as Josey’s Prince Charming. Richard Jenkins is far from a household name, but after 40 features, you’re bound to recognize the face. (He’s best known today for his work on “Six Feet Under.”) Although I never once believed what the script called for his character to pull off, his performance as the dejected father is nonetheless the film’s finest.

The filmmakers’ single-minded pursuit is suffocating. Instead of allowing the characters, or heaven forbid directorial style, to organically advance the story, everything takes a back seat to the all-mighty message. Director Niki Caro seems content checking items off her cultural agenda. Television sets blast Mel yelling on (and at) “Alice” and clips of the Anita Hill hearing are a prime influence on Josey’s decision to rebel. Framing the story is a courtroom battle that eventually swaps out jurisprudence in favor of maudlin melodrama.

Since her star-making turn in Monster (another message pic, albeit an above-average one), Ms. Theron was perfectly cast as Britt Ekland in HBO’s Peter Sellers biopic and as a capricious bisexual in the period drama Head in the Clouds. (Not too shabby, particularly in light of Halle Berry’s trading on her Oscar for a well-paid litterbox.) She suits the material a little too well, and I hope that Ms. Theron doesn’t entirely abandon escapism and follow in the sullen, self-important footsteps of Jodie Foster. Let’s hope that the upcoming Aeon Flux isn’t Tomb Raider 3.

Judging by cinematographer Chris Menges’ purposefully drab exteriors, the film would best be titled How Gray Was My Valley. An occasional director (Shy People), Menges’ razor-sharp long shots of the muffled, impersonal mine add a breathtaking counterpoint to the verbal fireworks indoors and, along with the performances, is the only reason to see this film.

Directed by George Clooney

Written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov

Starring: David Strathairn, George Clooney, Patricia Clarkson and Robert Downey, Jr.

93 min. in glorious black and white!

To an impressionable 4-year-old, Edward R. Murrow came across just slightly less intimidating than Bela Lugosi. Ashen, dour-faced, smoking like a gangster and speaking in a perpetual monotone, the guy sent me running for the safety of mom’s apron strings. Even on the more personable “Person to Person,” where he beamed my idol Groucho Marx directly into my living room, Murrow’s starchy, stiff-upper-everything was beyond scary. Why was I not surprised to learn that he grew up in a Quaker abolitionist household?

Many years and dozens of kinescopes later I was able to catch up with the power of this legendary television journalist. Nowadays the oxymoron “television journalist” draws sneers, but with Senator Joe McCarthy planting commies under our beds, Murrow was America’s brave voice of reason. What attracted George Clooney to this project? He has television news in his blood (his father, Nick Clooney, spent 30 years as an anchor) and Murrow was a hero around the family dinner table.

Television was in its infancy in 1953 when Murrow (David Strathairn) became a paragon of broadcast journalism. His weekly documentary series “See it Now” was about to be rocked by the obsessive hatred of a paranoid senator from Wisconsin who claimed to have the answer to America’s woes: shake a tree and watch the subversives fall. Murrow reports of a pilot who was kicked out of the Navy for being a security risk, and he suspects McCarthy of having a hand in the dismissal. Found guilty without benefit of a trial, all charges against the Navy man remain classified. After a public feud erupts, McCarthy accuses the newsman of red leanings. He accepts an invitation to appear on Murrow’s show, but only if his rebuttal is pre-taped.

My colleagues and I debated the film’s overabundant use of close-ups. Some argued that this was the director’s attempt to recapture the look of ’50s television. Nonsense. Check out Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy for a primer on how to adapt flat-lighting and static, TV-safe compositions to the big screen. While he does a commendable job of dramatizing the material, Clooney the actor does not want us to miss one emotional detail coming from his hand-picked cast. He is skilled at directing overlapping dialogue, not imagery.

When the camera does pull back, the audience is treated to production designer Jim Bissell’s superb period recreation. Every detail, right down to Murrow’s beloved Kent cigarettes, is impeccable. A warning to fellow addicts: This is a tough film to get through without feeling the urge to light up. Not since Body Heat has a film been so infused with second-hand smoke.

Mr. Clooney dons an additional cap playing Murrow’s producer, Fred Friendly. By all accounts, Friendly was a larger-than-life character, although you’d never guess it by Clooney’s demure portrayal. Nor do we ever get a look into Murrow’s life away from CBS. Clooney claims that he did not want his film to be another celebrity biopic, while in truth nothing would stand in the way of his film’s message. In one of the rare moments where the film veers from a civics lesson, Clooney treats us to Murrow’s interview with Liberace where he asks the closeted superstar if he plans to wed in the near future. This cheap attempt to get a laugh is a misplaced intrusion, and that goes double for jazz singer Dianne Reeves’ tacked-on musical motif.

The cast is superb, particularly David Strathairn, who captures the look, tone and credibility of the “the face of television.” Jeff Daniels and Frank Langella play the network honchos worried that Murrow’s attacks may cost them sponsors. Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson are a closeted husband and wife working for a network that bans the employment of married couples. The part of Joe McCarthy was wisely cast through documentary footage. Ernest Borgnine is too old and James Gandolfini brings too much mafioso baggage with him. No actor today could play the role with more conviction than the actual horse’s ass.

To paraphrase Woody Allen, if Edward R. Murrow came back today and saw what was being done in the name of tele-journalism, he’d never stop throwing up. Murrow’s fearlessness was unlike anything witnessed on television, even to this day. It’s sleepy 2005 and the bravest, least compromised component of Good Night and Good Luck is its black-and-white film stock. If Clooney really wanted to emulate Murrow’s spirit, he would have found a way to directly attack the current administration instead of relying on a parable from the past. While the film tells us that not much has changed between the junior senator and Bush, Jr., a part of me is angered that many Americans will learn about the communist witch-hunt by watching a fictional Hollywood movie. Still, if ever a film’s heart and mind were in the right place and aimed at a country set on “snooze,” it’s this one.

The most inspiring element of Good Night and Good Luck remains the power of Murrow’s writing and it’s relevance in today’s political climate. There is no better way to close this review than by giving Mr. Murrow the last word: “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result… and whose fault is that? Not really [McCarthy’s]. He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it – and rather successfully. Cassius was right: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ Good night and good luck.”