State of Playis a clíched thriller about digging the dirt in Washington, writes MICHAEL DWYER.
IT TAKES just two people to produce another human being, but reworking the riveting BBC series State of Playas a credible movie in its own right has defeated three experienced screenwriters.
All three appeared to have some pedigree to tackle a tangled thriller interweaving politics and journalism: Billy Ray ( Breach, Shattered Glass), Matthew Michael Carnahan ( Lions for Lambs) and Tony Gilroy ( Michael Claytonand the Bournetrilogy). But what they have produced in State of Playfeels contrived, simplistic and cliché-riddled.
Perhaps it's a case of too many cooks spoiling a particularly tasty broth, given that Steven Gaghan's adept adaptation of a Channel 4 drama for Steven Soderbergh's powerful T rafficmade it look deceptively easy to compress a multilayered TV series to feature- film length and to sustain its dramatic complexity.
Transposing State of Playfrom one crucible of political power (London) to another (Washington) makes sense, and the movie maintains the essence of its source narrative. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is an ambitious congressman whose star is in the ascent until his researcher dies suspiciously and it's revealed that he was sexually involved with her.
The Washington Globereporter assigned to the story is veteran Cal McAffrey (a mannered Russell Crowe) who just happens to have been the congressman's college roommate, even though he looks considerably older, and to have had an affair with Collins's wife (Robin Wright Penn).
In a contemporary spin on those bygone movies where women were resented or patronised in newsrooms, McAffrey glowers with disapproval when a novice blogger, doe-eyed Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), is put on the same story. While we rightly suspect that mutual respect is only a few reels away, how that is expressed is cringe-inducing to watch.
McAffrey is a grumpy, paunchy slob with unkempt hair, a bottle of whiskey in his desk and Irish traditional music blasting from the stereo in his crock of a car. However, he’s remarkably intuitive and evidently enjoys unique access as a journalist, strolling into a police morgue to peruse the belongings and mobile phone history of a murder victim.
Helen Mirren is saddled with the thankless, caricatured role of McAffrey’s foul-mouthed editor, whose opening line is, “Well, was he knobbing her?” When she asks if he has any conflict of interest in covering a story related to his former roommate, she immediately accepts his negative response. Then again, she is far more concerned with appeasing the publication’s new corporate owners and worrying over the downturn in newspaper sales.
This tepid thriller concludes on a montage following the production process of a news story, from when it’s sent by computer to when it’s on the front page of papers bundled in delivery trucks.
It’s a sentimental but poignant tribute to the newspaper business, but pales in comparison with to the ending of All the President’s Men, with Woodward and Bernstein click-clacking their explosive Watergate revelations on manual typewriters while Nixon’s re-election as president plays on TV in the background.
The screenplay of State of Playinvites such unfavourable comparisons by making heavy- handed references to the Watergate building in Washington.
Sketchily representing its characters by arch-defining tics, it reminds us that we learned little from the earlier film about Woodward and Bernstein beyond how dedicated they were to their profession, and how that sufficed. Here, a sequence in an underground car park is devoid of the tension that fuelled the surreptitious meetings in a similar setting between Bob Woodward and Deep Throat.
Kevin Macdonald, the Scottish director of The Last King of Scotland, opens State of Playwith an arresting nocturnal action sequence suggesting an atmosphere of fear. But that promise is soon squandered through such slovenly plotting that the unlocking of the alleged mystery is allowed to hang on gaping lapses of logic and huge, implausible coincidences.
Directed by Kevin Macdonald. Starring Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Jason Bateman, Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis 12A cert, gen release, 126 min
