State of Play

State of Play

127 Minutes

Perhaps due to the public’s ambivalence about the media, the days of the great American newspaper drama and the noble, crusading reporters of All the President’s Men appear to be gone for good. By now most people realize that the best journalists don’t really prioritize “making a difference” or whatever platitude we intone when kowtowing to the conventional virtues of the day. Real journalists just want to get at the truth, and the truth can be a very nasty thing indeed.

The newspaper reporters at the center of the tense, shrewd thriller, State of Play are not especially nice people. They’re crafty, pushy, full of sneaky tricks and they lie, flirt and browbeat their sources, and when that fails to get results they hand over fat envelopes of cash. They exercise impressive moral creativity and have a propensity for secretly tape-recording just about every conversation they have. Still, they root out the truth with the hot gleam of reportorial lust, an essential passion in any good journalist and an crucial resource in any free society. Sounds juicy, doesn’t it? Too bad I’m describing the BBC miniseries from which this dopey movie is adapted. Over the course of six hours, the critically acclaimed series dealt with murder, political cover-ups, personal loyalties and journalistic ethics. It took three pedigreed writers, Matthew Michael Carnahan (Lions For Lambs), Billy Ray (Shattered Glass) and Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton) to strip the fun, wit and depth of the original goldmine and to turn it into nothing more than a two-hour, relentlessly dull television procedural.

As Cal McCraffrey, Russell Crowe shambles through his scenes as the old school, dirty-pawed, ridiculously-coifed newshound; his underdog cred (and only attempt at characterization) established by the shitty old Saab he drives, the Irish music he sings along to and the piles of crap in his apartment and desk. When the aide/mistress of his college ex-roomie/Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) dies mysteriously on the eve of the politician’s exposure of a Blackwater-like security contractor, the whisky-quaffing Cal probes the links between the woman’s demise, the murder of a young junkie, and seemingly every other piece of skulduggery being perpetrated in the nation’s capital. Racing to get the truth to press before the inept police solve the deaths, he joins forces with his paper’s gossip blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) and keeps on the right side of hardass editor Dame Helen Mirren, who shouts lines like, “The real story is the sinking of this newspaper!”

Thirty minutes in, Crowe gives up trying to convince us that Affleck’s Stephen could ever have been an old college pal. Affleck is miscast and inherently bad in the part, acting mostly with his square jaw and a hint of tight lip. We’re told that they go way back and that they’re good friends, but we never feel it when they share the screen. All we see are two strangers going through the motions. This is the writing’s (and directing) biggest shortcoming, as Cal’s ultimate personal conflict and ethical morass is supposed to be born from this central relationship. The crucial moment when Cal has to decide which is stronger- his journalistic ethics or his loyalty to his friend- passes by undetected and we don’t care. Against all odds, it’s Jason Bateman who scores late with a funny turn as a pansexual public-relations playboy, as does Jeff Daniels as a ruthless House powerbroker. Too little too late. We don’t care.

This muddled thriller consists mostly of failed suspense and tiresome moves which play out long before the last unconvincing twist. Macdonald directed the trivializing Idi Amin melodrama The Last King of Scotland, and here, along with the writers, ineptly exploits Iraq-quagmire topicality along with a journo-romance about the impending death of newsprint while trying to strike a balance between the many themes and the ongoing mystery. They should have instead revisited any Screenwriting 101 tome and concentrated on characterization and relationships in order to engage us emotionally. We want to care.

The mini-series orchestrated the emotions of the viewer, and offered a vision of the truth as an endless unfolding of character and power, pursued by people who are no less precious for being deeply flawed. State of Play makes no such demands and leaves us with nothing more than the credits over the soon-to-be archaic images of the printing of a newspaper.

by Teri Carson