Paul Abbott’s much-admired BBC drama serial about a murderous conspiracy at the heart of the British establishment has been condensed and Americanised into a decent, workmanlike, old-fashioned political thriller, directed by Kevin Macdonald.
The original had seemed so edgy and contemporary — State of Play was state of the art — but the movie version, though perfectly watchable, could have been made any time in the past 30 years, despite references to blogs.
The TV show had young John Simm as the political journalist, Cal, once a campaign manager for a politician who is now intensely embarrassed by the apparent suicide of a beautiful young female researcher. The film transmutes this character into Russell Crowe, as an older and more traditionally rumpled investigative reporter, less obviously encumbered by personal conflicts of interest, but encumbered nevertheless.
He is that enviable kind of journalist who never seems to have much to do in the way of work, and his grizzled integrity and heart-of-gold cynicism transmits itself in the form of a grotty car, dingy flat and a sprinkle of Irish-lite mannerisms.
On the small screen his editor was played by Bill Nighy. But now, in the most extraordinary career shift in history, the editor is played by … Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison. Jane, having dug up all manner of backyard patios, studied all sorts of corpse photos on whiteboards and endured every kind of creepy sexist condescension from her dodgy copper colleagues, has now evidently been rewarded with a crash course in newspaper editing and parachuted in as the Brit editor-in-chief of the Washington Globe.
The casting of Helen Mirren could, on the other hand, be a subliminal tribute to Britian’s renowned mastery of journalism’s grubby arts, or perhaps an acknowledgement of Mirren’s queenly claim to any high-status role going. At any rate, it is always good to see her and hear that distinctive, marginally roughened-up street-cred accent. Nobody calls her “guv”, but she does refer to a “geezer”.
Ben Affleck plays Stephen Collins, the troubled congressman her paper is writing about, a man who is taking on the sinister, unaccountable corporate powers with their snouts in the defence-security trough — powers who may be behind the death of the young employee with whom Collins had a dalliance. Rachel McAdams plays Della, the feisty young blogger with whom Mirren forces grumpy old Cal, that exasperated warrior from the Journalism 1.0 old school, to team up. Cal and Della break the biggest scoop of their careers and, despite her modernity, Della doesn’t seem to mind handling the softer “female” side of the story.
Crowe ticks every box for the Hollywood journalist. In the real world we tend to have the unexciting appendages of family, children, elderly parents and so on, to whose unsexy needs we must attend on getting home from work in the evening. Crowe, of course, is a super-cool loner in a sparsely masculine apartment, in which he can take anonymous calls in the dead of night.
In the real world we tend to be obliged to show up on time for work — and then, in fact, do some work. Crowe, in that fantastic big-screen way I have never been able to manage, shows up in the office hours after everyone else and then does a kind of running lap of honour, exchanging quips and in-jokes with various other ranks to show how unstarry and down-to-earth he is, before cracking on with the day’s business: exchanging barbed badinage with the editor. His stories apparently do not need to be subedited or run past the legal department.
Cal and his chief are pursued at one stage by a wimpy type, who asks whingeingly if the editor has had time yet to read his piece about a “guinea pig — it’s a great human-interest story”. Macdonald could just as well have flashed up an announcement: “Russell Crowe is a sexy macho guy, as opposed to this poof with his guinea pigs.” (I have, incidentally, never heard any real-life journalist use the phrase “human-interest story”.)
Having said all this, State of Play rattles along satisfactorily and Crowe brings to the role a relaxed self-possession and even charm. I preferred his more authentically paranoid performance as the Big Tobacco whistle-blower in Michael Mann’s conspiracy thriller The Insider but, nevertheless, he carries the picture capably and the movie is an entertaining ride, with a big cast of characters whose contributions to the plot, though not strictly speaking plausible, are all cleverly managed and orchestrated by Macdonald. Now all we need is a big-screen Hollywood version of Paul Abbott’s Shameless. I’m sure there’s a role for Crowe in that as well. —