State of Play Directed by Kevin Macdonald
It must be difficult, crafting a political conspiracy thriller these days, what with all the conspiracies to choose from. One almost has to feel sorry for the team of screenwriters responsible for the new Washington thriller State of Play when they get all tangled up in theirs. Ben Affleck, playing a congressman who seems to be a Republican, calls a hearing in which he upbraids the head of a firm clearly based on Blackwater. First he accuses the firm's ex-military employees of being "mercenaries" who commit "atrocities" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then a minute later he says the Blackwater-like firm is getting its noble ex-military employees killed.
Well, whatever. It's a corporation, and it's bad, and Iraq is bad, and Afghanistan is bad. Another congressman who complains when someone takes the Lord's name in vain is bad, and he's in it with the bad corporation, which is attempting to privatize homeland security, which is bad-I mean the privatization is bad, not homeland security, although that's almost certainly bad too, only the part of the movie in which it's explained why it's bad was probably cut and will be on the DVD.
It's unfortunate the economic crisis hit after filmmaking was completed, because maybe Affleck could have blamed that on Blackwater too. Indeed, in its focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, State of Play seems instantly dated, like the moment in the first Austin Powers movie when Dr. Evil, who's been in the deep freeze since the 1960s, says he wants to blackmail the world for $1 million. And the event that gets the plot moving, the death of a congressional staffer, evokes the murder of Chandra Levy in the spring of 2001, a moment in time that, in some strange way, seems longer ago than the 1960s.
A few months ago, I wrote about a movie- Rachel Getting Married-with a great screenplay by Jenny Lumet that was almost ruined by its hamfisted director, Jonathan Demme. State of Play is almost exactly the opposite. It's a movie with a dreadful screenplay (in this case, by a team of screenwriters adapting a popular 2003 British miniseries) that is almost saved by the stunningly capable direction of Kevin Macdonald. He gives State of Play a sensationally visceral, off-kilter quality that helps sustain the viewer's interest long after we should all have been guffawing out loud and making plans for an early exit.
State of Play has the feel of one of those terrific mid-1970s conspiracy thrillers, like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View, in which no one can find a safe haven and where a city's streets are full of an inexplicable and nerve-jangling menace. That is entirely due to Macdonald, with a strong assist to Russell Crowe, the greatest motion-picture actor of our day, in one of his most enjoyably understated turns. Macdonald and his team did a brilliant job picking strange and out-of-the-way Washington locations that heighten the sense of oddity and confusion experienced by the characters.
A successful thriller has to ground its action in something very real and tangible; a little realism is necessary to anchor the preposterous storyline in the world we know. This is why mystery and thriller novelists work so hard to get the details right when it comes to the mundane settings and trappings of their work; we may not know how a forensics lab actually works, but we all have built-in bull detectors that do let us know when things are off.
That realism is what is missing from State of Play, and not just in the inconsistent idiocy spouted by Ben Affleck's character. State of Play follows the exploits of a Washington, D.C., newspaper reporter (Crowe) who behaves in ways no newspaper reporter has ever behaved in the employ of a newspaper that functions as no newspaper has ever functioned since the dawn of time. (On this paper, for example, reporters push a button and start the presses while their editors look on admiringly, not actually having read through the article the reporter has written.)
Crowe's character covers the police beat, but somehow ends up as the lead reporter on a complex story involving a national politician, a corporation, and the Defense Department-and conveniently has sources everywhere he turns. This wouldn't happen, to put it mildly. And it double-time wouldn't happen if the subject of the investigation (Affleck) were his college roommate, whom he had cuckolded by having a tumble with his gorgeous and neglected wife (Robin Wright Penn). By the time Affleck is beating up on one of Crowe's confidential sources (Jason Bateman, in a fantastic little performance) in an Arlington motel room, the movie has achieved a level of credibility about the business of newspapering matched only by the depiction of the Daily Bugle in Spider-Man. The movie does have a good twist up its sleeve at the end, though it almost bollixes it through the ludicrous introduction of a monologue delivered by the left's favorite new character, the deranged Iraq war vet. Only this one is-wait for it-a deranged Iraq war vet . . . from 1991!
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary , is THE WEEKLY STANDARD 's movie critic.