Newsroom thriller 'State of Play' already dated
Kevin Macdonald's corporate conspiracy thriller "State of Play" already feels dated even before it opens today at area theaters.
Macdonald's film - based on a six-hour, 2003 BBC miniseries squished, folded and pressed into a two-hour Hollywood feature - ends with a montage of images showing a Washington, D.C. newspaper, the Globe, running off the presses and being diligently delivered by vans over the city.
It's almost a prescient, tearful tribute to the traditional American newspaper, an homage to the classic, investigative journalist genre in the days before current newspaper industry woes.
"State of Play" nobly attempts to resurrect the stock, hard-bitten crack journalist from 1930s Hollywood in Russell Crowe's Cal McAffrey, but it doesn't quite work in 2009. McAffrey is an unmade bed who drives a junker 1990 Saab and proudly brags he works on a 16-year-old computer terminal. Twenty years ago, a reporter who preferred an old-fashioned typewriter over a computer was pugnaciously eccentric. Today, it's career suicide for a journalist not to be on top of technology.
In the tense, opening scene, a killer with a silenced pistol chases down and fatally shoots one man, then shoots a witness on a bicycle. He survives and is taken to the hospital just before a female staffer for Congressman Stephen Collins (the unemotive Ben Affleck) "falls" in front of a D.C. subway train.
Could they be connected? Did Collins, who has been best pals with McAffrey since college, have an affair with the dead woman?
McAffrey springs to action, but his boss, Washington Globe editor in chief Cameron Lynne (a woefully underused Helen Mirren in a highly truncated role) insists he work with a new partner, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), one of the Globe's newfangled bloggers.
Crabby McAffrey views the blogger as a lightweight. The war commences. Their feisty put-downs are supposed to be a throwback to the sharp exchanges in a Ben Hecht script, but they don't get thrown back enough.
"State of Play" has bigger issues to float than newspapers and feuding reporters. Congressman Collins has ruffled the feathers of big private military contractors, and they would like nothing better than to discredit the politician and get him out of their way.
Although Macdonald's movie makes deliberate references to Alan Pakula's 1976 D.C.-set classic "All the President's Men" (McAffrey visits the Watergate Hotel, plus he contacts a "Deep Throat"-like source), its story is sheer soap opera in comparison.
McAffrey is a liar, an unethical, compromised journalist and an adulterer whose affair with Collins' wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn in another undeveloped, functional supporting part) somehow didn't wreck his friendship with Collins.
Gradually, McAffrey's investigation leads to another one of Hollywood's standard-issue corporate villains, this one being a well-connected conglomerate called PointCorp, a supplier of, among other things, private armies.
Crowe presses on, exuding the proper amount of sneering disrespect for institutions and rules. McAdams, stuck with a superficial character, is completely out of her weight class when sparring with him.
Jeff Daniels turns in a reserved performance as a vaguely villainous Capitol Hill politician. Then we get the movie's best scene-stealing performance by Jason Bateman as Dominic Foy, a sleazy D.C. publicist conned into helping McAffrey while as high as a skyscraper.
Although "State of Play" seems a few months behind the newspaper curve, it does make one concession to current culture.
"There is no way we can make the deadline!" the Globe editor shouts. McAffrey replies, "Yes, we can!"
How Obama of him.
"State of Play"
Rating: 2&189; stars
Starring: Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Jason Bateman
Directed by: Kevin Macdonald
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for drug use, language, violence. 127 minutes