Is it just me, or does many a thriller these days start off well, and yet fail to nail its concluding act? Many of them suffer from divided personalities that usually cannot quite reconcile to being either intense and believable, or hyped-up and spotted with action, and they all seem to finish up revolving around the same tricks of secreted recording devices and waved guns. State of Play, adapted by Kevin Macdonald from his own British teledrama, is no exception, being a deliberately low-tech, noir-inflected drama about investigation, but sporting unlikely physical confrontations and a throwaway last-minute twist that’s neither especially believable nor compelling, but feels merely dutiful.
State of Play is about unravelling both public and private malfeasance in Washington, with its doughy, scruffy antihero Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe), as shaggy and endangered as the form itself, an experienced and skilled print journalist, saddled with outmoded ideals and some unacknowledged conflicts of interest. He digs into a scenario peppered with scandal and murder involving around his old college buddy, Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who may be the target for discrediting by monstrous private security form Pointcorp, chief beneficiary of outsourced military contracts and employment of mercenaries in the War on Terror, when his chief researcher (and girlfriend) turns up dead.
In the course of his excavations, Cal takes on a kind of acolyte in goggle-eyed but whip-smart blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), employed as not much more than a gossip columnist, who has to grow up swiftly on the job when she hitches her wagon to Cal’s hunch. She’s soon faced with immediate violence and morally slippery expediencies, as when a witness is shot in front of her, and when Cal confronts her with some of the sleazier tactics of high-pressure journalism.
The usual imagery and gimmicks of the conspiracy-flick come into play: the rogue shadowy assassin, the omnipotent evil company, the structure that entwines the lowest person on the street with the highest spheres of office, the plucky hero only partly aware of his own frailty both in the physical and ethical sense, all portrayed in a teeming landscape of capital edifices and bland constructions spot-lit amidst inky night-scapes.
This is merged with a surprisingly straight variation on the deadline-beating reporter drama that was old-hat by His Girl Friday, and inevitably evokes All the President’s Men as Cal and Della try to keep their hard-assed but finally supportive editor, Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren), on their side. Like Tykwer’s The International this year, and last year’s Michael Clayton, it’s unashamedly paranoid in its suspicions about corporate prerogative, and, again like both of them, can’t quite work out how to escape the octopus’s clutches in a logical, entirely satisfying fashion, without clumsily compromising its essential themes and still delivering a satisfying finale. The days when Hitchcock tied these together with both efficiency and spectacle, or when Alan Pakula did it with spare menace, are missed.
At least the film has characters of some substance, for Cal and Stephen are more closely and fractiously linked than either would like, with Cal having had an affair with Stephen’s wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn, affectingly soulful) that binds all three of them in knots of friendship, resentment, and guilt. The efficacies of being both a seamy bastard oneself and yet possessing a scrupulous sense of truth are intriguingly introduced through both Cal, who shambles along like a homeless dog whenever he’s not the bloodhound tracking a scent like a drug, and Collins, who’s caught in a bind he can’t escape from, but pushes ahead anyway. But the film’s generic bent dulls opportunities to make it truly rich in this regard: the human drama proves to be little more than complicating back-story on the way to Cal scoring a younger girlfriend.
But what am I complaining about? Accepted clichés, compromises and all, State of Play is engaging and thoroughly entertaining, mostly because of its cast, studded with excellence down to the smallest parts, and who do their work with gusto. Crowe pulls off the trick of being effortlessly magnetic even when playing a character who’s seventh-tenths jerk…okay not much of a stretch there. Casting the adorable McAdams here, as in Red Eye, seems akin to an act of sadism, but McAdams is a cagey actress who knows how to turn her perky suburban voice and “dewy cub reporter eyes”, as Lynne describes them, to her advantage, for she and Crowe play off each-other beautifully. Mirren herself is terrifically wry as Lynne, and Affleck is effective as a golden boy going to seed. Kudos too for Jeff Daniels, sleek and convincing as a fascist disguised by hypocritical religious scruples, Harry Lennix as a dry and reprehending detective, and Jason Bateman in what I think can now be called the Jason Bateman role, that of a slick, glib twit in over his head.