Hola all. Massawyrm here.
It feels very odd writing about this film here on Ain’t it Cool. After all, STATE OF PLAY is very much a film about the last days of the newspaperman. Incredibly timely, especially in light of the recent newspaper closings, bankruptcies and talk of a potential bailout, this tells a classic, 70’s style reporter-on-the-beat story festooned with all the modern conveniences. But there’s one added hitch. It’s got a very anti-internet thing going on.
The film is your standard political intrigue thriller told through the eyes of a longtime newsman (Russell Crowe). We open with a murder and we’re off from there. Adapted from a popular British miniseries (spanning roughly 5 and a ½ hours), this film is dense, packing in that level of information into an internally massive 2. Which of course leaves no room for fluff. It is bambambam for the entire length of the film, each scene always delivering on the promise of the scene before it. As a mystery film it is exquisite, offering a fantastic story with a great series of twists and turns that are never telegraphed or readily predictable.
When a young researcher for a sitting Senator (Ben Affleck) dies, his long time best friend (Crowe) begins to look into what’s going on. But as his editor (Perry White by way of Helen Mirren) is riding him for blocking their attempts at a sexy angle on the seedy story, he is desperately trying to juggle getting the truth and protecting his friend. Crowe is backed up by Rachel McAdams – and that’s where the message begins to get a bit muddy. You see, she’s a blogger. And he’s not cool with that. He’s the last line of defense before the bloggers take over and destroy journalism forever. So he decides to take her under his wing and make a real reporter out of her.
And that’s cool. The film doesn’t so much lament the fall of the print media as the core of its story – it simply references it occasionally with bitterness. At the same time, the film is wrestling with everything that is wrong with the mainstream print media – internal bias, editorial control over a story, the interruption of ongoing police investigations for the sake of the scoop, the lean towards tabloid journalism and the desire to sell papers above getting the story straight. It very much takes the tack that bloggers are a bunch of 20 something’s hungry to be journalists but lack the knowhow or standards that you get at a newspaper. And it seems to make the mistake a lot of people making the argument make.
That journalists and bloggers who operate on the internet are somehow the same thing.
They’re not. Journalists are journalists. I work with a number of them. But I eschew the title myself. I’m not a journalist – I’m an editorialist. At best. Many bloggers are simply editorialists. They read the news, they share their take on it. No different than the editorial section of a paper. It doesn’t help that many people fire up their blogspot profile and begin whining that no one will accept their press credentials. Because they write. About news. So they’re journalists, right? No. Again, journalists are journalists. If you spend more time tapping contacts, making friends and calling around to get statements from involved parties – then odds are you are a journalist. If you spend more time jockeying a keyboard than on the phone or gathering previously unprinted information – then odds are you’re a blogger. It’s not that hard. But to hear the arguments about the death of journalism with the death of print, you’d think it was.
And really I might have let it slip past as a character quirk of a reporter watching his industry fade away – except that the film ends on a dour note with a loving, almost nostalgic look at the printing and distribution of a newspaper – from typesetting to curb. It was like one of those sequences you would see on Sesame Street when you were a kid or something. Only tinged with sadness. And while excellently assembled – I mean you could almost smell the ink on your hands – it certainly leaves one pondering the death of print. I love print. Always have. My first published piece wasn’t online. It was in the San Antonio Express News – an editorial that I submitted when I was 15. I remember the day my father came home proud because all day people at work had mistaken my name for his and stopped by to congratulate him on the piece – only to discover that it was his son who had written it instead. I still have that clipped, right here on my bulletin board. Right next to my first quote in USAToday. There’s something magical about print. Something special.
But all good things must come to an end. And for the print media, that time is now. It is time for them to evolve or be replaced. People don’t want to pay a dollar for their news any more. They don’t want yesterday’s news today. They want the same level of journalism in electronic form. It’s not the end of the world. However, it is the end of films like this. We’re looking at what may be the last great Newspaper reporter on the beat story ever told on film that isn’t a period piece. There’s not a lot of high tech research in this thing. No Google searching their way out of a mystery. It’s hardcore, old school journalism – lead following and contact making. And it is quite a solid movie. If print is gonna go out, let it go out like this – elegantly with wonderful performances. This film is definitely recommended.
Until next time friends, smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em.
Massawyrm
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