State of Play

This American remake of a brilliant British miniseries tries to cram too many plot twists into its running time. Where the 6-hour series was continuously surprising, the 2-hour film seems manipulative. That said, you are being manipulated by some mighty fine actors, from Russell Crowe as the rumpled old-school reporter to Helen Mirren as his high-powered editor trying to cope with the new corporate owners of the “Washington Globe,” with adequate support from Rachel McAdams as the online newbie with whom Crowe is oddly coupled, and Ben Affleck as his old college roommate, who is now a crusading congressman with a whole closetful of secrets. Dynamic young director Kevin Macdonald certainly knows how to keep up the pace of the original, though sometimes leaving the sense behind. Many opportunities for topicality are strewn in the story’s wake, especially the Blackwater-like mercenary army that is the subject of Affleck’s investigating committee, but more in the vein of exploitation than explanation. At the heart of the enterprise is a nostalgia for the disappearing world of print journalism, and a romantic hope for the persistence of its values into the realm of the internet. I’m inclined to recommend this film, if just for the lovely coda of the closing credit sequence, where we take a last lingering look at a newspaper being “composed” (or whatever they call it these days -- when my printer father worked wallcase or linotype he was called a compositor), rolled through the presses, collated, packed, and sent out on trucks into a new day. My brother -- who should know, having worked his entire career at newspapers, until he escaped into public broadcasting last year -- asserted the film got the newsroom atmospherics right, though much of the substance wrong. (2009, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-64)