A fairly good news story

A fairly good news story


Cinema
Daniel Carey

THOSE of us who write for a living are used to seeing stories being overtaken by events. Lovingly-crafted introductions have to be scrapped, headlines changed, new pictures found, new sources contacted, entire articles binned. But rarely does a story have to be completely re-crafted not once, not twice, but three times in a single day, as happens towards the end of ‘State of Play’. And the film is all the better for it. ‘State of Play’ is a thriller, after all, and a decent one at that, so there are twists by the bucket-load. Based on a six-hour mini-series, it spins a multilayered web involving journalism, politics, death, corruption, war, infidelity, friendship and blogging. There’s a lot going on here.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald, the man behind ‘The Last King of Scotland’, its main character is Cal McAffrey, a hard-living newspaperman of Irish extraction played by Russell Crowe. Cal’s former college room-mate, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), is a rising star in the US Congress, but the death of his aide-cum-mistress threatens to derail his career. (Before you ask, yes his name IS Stephen Collins, and yes, like his Irish boxing namesake, he does get to punch somebody quite hard. Happy now?)
Cal ends up working on the story despite an obvious conflict of interest – he’s still friendly with Congressman Collins, and he had an affair with the politician’s wife. He teams up with blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), a connection between the Congressman’s deceased employee and two other murders is unravelled, and the prospect of a full-blown conspiracy rears its head.
Helen Mirren pops up as caricatured editor Cameron Lynne, who gets the clunkiest lines. Generally speaking, dialogue is not the movie’s strong suit – Della’s question ‘Did we just break the law?’ is met with a response from Cal (“No, that’s what you call damn fine reporting”) that’s straight out of the 1970s. There are also very few laughs (in contrast, for instance, to the 1994 Michael Keaton vehicle ‘The Paper’, which is consistently hilarious). The picture is at its best when Cal is out chasing up leads and piecing the jigsaw together, even if his level of access beggars belief. (When was the last time you met a journalist in a police morgue just as a post-mortem is about to be carried out?)
There are a lot of threads to the story, and sub-plots to beat the band. ‘State of Play’ looks at the dangers posed by private security contractors; the pros and cons of ‘old’ (print) and ‘new’ (web-based) journalism are thrashed out; the dangers of corporate control get a brief look-in; and Jason Bateman turns up as a PR flunky persuaded to spill the beans.
The last segment is a moving picture in every sense – one confrontation after another brings the story in a new direction, and the looming deadline gives an immediacy to the revelations. Somehow, everybody resists the temptation to say ‘hold the front page’, and in an era where newspapers are full of stories about the industry’s impending demise, it’s nice to see something that paints a relatively positive, semi-plausible picture of journalism.
There are repeated references to the Watergate building in Washington, which are presumably meant to evoke memories of ‘All The President’s Men’. The three screenwriters on ‘State of Play’ would have been better off avoiding such obvious allusions – this is not in the same league as Woodward and Bernstein, just a perfectly enjoyable way to spend just over two hours.