It's not just the cigarettes, though he did have to smoke up to 50 of them in a day's shooting. It's not just the Brylcreemed hair, or the pin-striped suits, or the knitted brow. It's not just the same words, spoken in the same cadence, with the same inflection.
No, what turns David Strathairn into Edward R. Murrow in Good Night, and Good Luck is the weight he seems to carry, his search for truth in a medium that doesn't really want it. Strathairn, 57, goes beyond imitation into a portrayal that makes director George Clooney's meticulous re-creation of TV news in the McCarthy era seem even more real. ''He's an actor who is able to play a text and subtext,'' director John Sayles, a classmate at Williams College, has said.
Strathairn first appeared on screen in Sayles' 1980 debut, Return of the Secaucus 7. Since then, he's tackled a wide range of roles: heroic, villainous, nerdy, sexy, and zany. He's played other historical figures, from pitcher Eddie Cicotte in Eight Men Out to A-bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the CBS movie Day One. But Strathairn and Murrow were a match made, if not in heaven, at least at the first table read. Milo Radulovich, the airman whom Murrow helps to exonerate in the film, was there, and so were Casey Murrow, his son, and Ruth Friendly, widow of producer Fred Friendly, who's played by Clooney. After the reading, Ruth told Strathairn, ''That was just great, you know.'' Of Murrow, Strathairn has said, ''He had the skill to tell a story and get across the resonances of it, the kind of feelings involved and what it means in a larger scope. That is very hard to do, and his particular skill was in that.'' He could have been describing his own performance.
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