It's not a bad preview in terms of accomplishing the first goal all trailers intend: It makes you want to see the movie. But it makes you want to see a different movie than the one Clooney and company made. With it's flash cuts and intense drumbeat backdrop, the trailer suggests an action-packed conspiracy thriller, a pulse-quickening Manchurian Candidate-style showdown between Senator Joseph McCarthy and the brave men at CBS who dared to take him on (the only thing that's missing is a shot of a gun, although all those percussive transitions approximate it well enough). The thing is, Good Night, and Good Luck is anything but an action movie. It's wall-to-wall words, reenacting the boardroom meetings and broadcasts that eventually led to McCarthy's censure.

Maybe the trailer will work. Maybe it will draw in a crowd for a movie that, impressive as it is, seems suited for such a small segment of the moviegoing audience. This is a film about ethics, choices, and above all, personal and public responsibility. Its political intrigue is not of the race-against-the-clock, your-family-is-in-jeopardy variety, and I fear that the trailer does a dishonest job of representing the movie, one that could risk sabotaging the film in the minds of people who go in expecting something more than an elegantly structured history lesson.

What would I have done differently? Why not show the movie as it really is by quickly setting up the conflict between McCarthy and the American public, then let one of Murrow's broadcasts speak for itself? (Incidentally, the official website gets it right.) The film is jazzy, elegant, and grounded in Edward R. Murrow's words. Give him a chance to talk in the trailer, and I trust that intellectual audiences would recognize that those were the days when newscasters treated their audience with intelligence and respect, rather than addressing them at a third-grade level, and this is a movie that feels the same way.