State of Play (2009)

This movie's better than the reviews might lead you to believe. It's taut and well put together, and Russell Crowe's still a dream of an actor (though perhaps not of a person).

The main complaint I saw in reviews was Ben Affleck's casting as the philandering, cuckolded Representative Stephen Collins and former college roommate of Crowe's wildly unethical and intensely dedicated reporter Cal McAffrey, which is exactly the wrong kind of criticism to read. At every turn, Affleck's casting seemed exactly right. There wasn't a scene or nuance that wasn't believable from him. That is, unfortunately, until the very last. How horrible for a finely crafted performance to fall short in the exact moment it needs to rise above.

And rise above is what most of this movie fails to do. There's a lot of sitting around a computer watching others type. Though typing is a fairly large percentage of any writing job, it's rarely exciting to watch. Hilariously, the movie refuses to let us even so much as read over Cal's shoulder for very long and never gives voice to his actual text. We're meant to take his single-minded pursuit of his story as evidence of his writing prowess.

The other thing the movie fails to do is give us a delightfully sleazy Jason Bateman in every scene. I haven't seen him in a single ad, which is a mistake. He owns his screen time. I only wish he had had a scene with the criminally underused Helen Mirren. She's a dream of an editor, capable of defending her writers and cutting them down in the same stroke.

There's the usual paranoia over the internet and blogging as death to journalism (particularly ridiculous is the notion that it should be an insane point of pride to share a byline in a print edition when one already has one's own blog with a major daily), and it's made slightly worse by the fact that Rachel McAdams, who I generally enjoy, starts out strong but finishes bland. There's an adorable scene with a pen necklace that almost makes up for it, but I wished that we could have spent more time with Robin Wright Penn as Collins' wife Anne. Now there's a performance that suggests a lot with only a little to go on.

Director Kevin Macdonald and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan, Tony Gilroy, and Billy Ray want desperately to make their own 70s political thriller (suggested with Wright Penn's wardrobe, as pointed out by eagle-eyed Emily; made ridiculously obvious by pinning up a photo of Woodward and Berstein at Cal's desk). While it's full of the right kind of bon mots, they are exactly the kind of bon mots that don't hold up if you take a minute to parse them. Cal makes a crack about working at the paper for 15 years on a 16 year-old computer, and you chuckle, but then you wonder what he had to do to hang onto said computer when everyone else was going through mandatory updates. I doubt it's what Macdonald et al meant for you to wonder about. B-