State of Play (3 Stars)

Movie Review by Michael Phillips

 

Like Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," "State of Play" compresses a British television miniseries into a stand-alone American thriller and does a pretty good job of it.

It's best to see the remake first and catch up with the 2003 BBC miniseries afterward.

That way you can enjoy the new version for what it is -- a sleek, reliable Hollywood package, wrapped in a mournful last hurrah for print investigative journalism -- instead of experiencing it through the prism of its superb predecessor, which came from a different era, one in which movie characters didn't go out of their way to remind audiences that "nobody reads the papers anymore."

Brad Pitt was originally scheduled to play the wizened, disheveled newspaper reporter on the trail of the biggest scandal since Watergate. His last-minute exit from the project cleared the path for a better actor, far better suited to adjectives like "wizened" and "disheveled."

Russell Crowe (above) is the star in question, portraying Cal McAffrey, star journalist and resident crank at the fictional Washington Globe.

His old friend, a U.S. congressman (Ben Affleck), sets the narrative in motion. When the congressman's aide is killed in a mysterious train-platform accident, the politician crumbles in public, while heading an investigative committee looking into the shadowy doings of a Blackwater-type private defense firm known as PointCorp. He confesses to an affair. This goes down poorly with the congressman's wife (Robin Wright Penn), with whom Cal once had relations. (The miniseries brought the reporter and the politician's wife together in the present tense, adding fuel, plus conflicts of interest aplenty, to the story's fire.)

"State of Play" begins with a seemingly unrelated murder of an African-American teenager, who, we're told early on, had some sort of connection to the dead woman.

Intrepid Cal pursues these strands, aided by a Globe staffer (Rachel McAdams) from the dreaded interloping online division. "She's young, she's cheap and she churns out copy several times a day," harrumphs the editor, played by Helen Mirren, pounding another nail into our hero's soul.

Director Kevin Macdonald brought a bright, hot palette to the murderous corruption of Idi Amin's regime in "The Last King of Scotland."

Here the director goes for cooler, more overtly sinister tones, punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. Macdonald handles these well: The prologue and a later assassination hit us hard, and quickly. The script cuts several corners in the interests of concision, and it's too bad the actor originally announced for the role of the congressman, Edward Norton, couldn't work out his schedule. Affleck's just OK; he seems to be struggling for gravitas and a way to activate his character's dilemma.

Everyone else, though, is very good.

The kind of acting Crowe does here won't win awards and doesn't scream for attention. Yet it serves the thriller conventions as well as the old-warrior-journalist cliches in style.

Are audiences cooling to '70s-style paranoiac entertainment? These days we like our paranoia on the grandest possible scale -- nothing less than the threat of planetary extinction will do. On the other hand, I take heart from the "Bourne" trilogy.

The Bourne films succeed both as pop art and big moneymakers, partly because they're practically abstract in terms of narrative, and yet there's a brain -- as well as one foot in a complicated geopolitical world -- and a moral compass guiding the action.

"State of Play" isn't a kinetic fireball like the second or third "Bourne" installment.

Like its protagonist, it's defiantly old school, "Three Days of the Condor" bleeding into "All the President's Men."

Not everyone will be interested in "State of Play's" depiction of the End Times of daily newspapering, but the differences between Paul Abbott's original teleplay and the new script, a many-hands affair (one of the hands being Tony Gilroy, of "Duplicity" and "Michael Clayton"), are fairly staggering.

I'm not giving anything away by noting that the miniseries and the film version end with nearly identical images, that of newspaper presses churning the hard-won truth.

The difference in tone, though, is striking. In 2003 the climax struck a triumphal chord. In 2009, it's more like an elegy.

 

 

State of Play MPAA rating: PG-13 (for some violence, language including sexual references, and brief drug content).

Running time: 1:58.

Starring: Russell Crowe (Cal McAffrey); Ben Affleck (Stephen Collins); Rachel McAdams (Della Frye); Helen Mirren (Cameron Lynne); Robin Wright Penn (Anne Collins); Jason Bateman (Dominic Foy); Jeff Daniels (George Fergus); Harry Lennix (Det. Bell).

Directed by: Kevin Macdonald; written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, based on the 2003 BBC TV miniseries by Paul Abbott; produced by Andrew Hauptman, Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. A Universal Pictures release.

 

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