State of Play

Do you know what I love? I love when movies appear to be about something, but really aren’t. State of Play is one of those movies. On the surface it appears to be about government corruption, new forms of defense contracting, journalistic integrity and complex human relationships, but it’s not. What it’s about is an excellent story and some damn fine entertainment.

State of Play is the story of a reporter for a Washington paper called the Globe. He’s Cal McAffrey and not down on his luck, he’s not a swindler, he’s not fighting the system. He’s just a good reporter, doing what good reporters do: chasing the story and greasing the wheels of whoever he has to to get it. As the movie begins two people are shot, a young drug dealer and a pizza delivery man. The pizza delivery man lives, the drug dealer does not. As Cal starts to investigate the story, his college roommate-turned-congressman Rep. Stephen Collins gets the news that a researcher on his team has been killed in a subway accident, considered suicide. She was the lead researcher on a major case he had been working on against a defense contractor called PointCorp, a company with who uses ex-American military as mercenaries, but who are war profiteering. Due to an emotional outburst at the hearing, the press gets wind that Rep. Collins was having an affair with this woman. Enter Della Frye, a young reporter who works for the ‘internet side” of the paper (basically she’s a blogger, about which many, many jokes are made). As both she and Cal begin to hunt down the respective facts of their cases, it becomes clear that the shooting of a drug dealer and a pizza delivery guy are connected to the death of a Congressman’s mistress in a high-level and very scary way.

Being based on a BBC television show (I was tipped off to the fact that it was a UK co-pro when I saw it was Working Title) the plot and writing are, of course, excellent. Rarely cliche it clips along at a steady, but not fevered pace. They do not discover anything that wasn’t out there to be discovered, there was no breaking into high level offices (like say the White House) to get the one document that that secretary forgot to shred at the end of the day, nor was there such sweeping corruption that their findings would completely bring down the government. This plot was completely realistic and extremely easy to believe. The performances by everyone in this movie only made it easier to buy. Everyone down to the mysterious assassin was perfectly in tone with the movie. Rachel McAdams continues to prove herself worthy of this kind of casting, choosing only roles that interest her and not over saturating the market with sweet, saccharine movies. She hit all the right notes between strong woman who can stand up for herself and a young woman who still isn’t completely sure of who she is and where she fits. Considering she was standing up to Helen Mirren and Russell Crowe, I think that’s pretty stellar. Mirren has never once been bad – in bad movies to be certain, but never bad in them. Her turn here as Editor in Chief only beginning her battle with her new employers who dictate what she can and can not print was excellent. I was especially entertained when she screamed at Cal.

Speaking of Cal, Russell Crowe continues to show us that he’s worth the price of a ticket alone. There is a scene when he’s sitting in a stairwell on the phone. The woman he’s talking to asks if he’ll buy her a drink after she goes to a press conference. He makes the face. You know this face, it’s the ‘eeeee’ face you make when you know you really want to do something but that doing it makes you walk into a minefield. It shows us that there’s something more going on there and we don’t know what it is. He’s a good enough actor that it doesn’t matter that *we* don’t know, only that he does. This is why, no matter how many phones he throws at people, Russell Crowe will continue to prove that he is an excellent performer worth your time.

While almost everything in this movie is good – from the art direction to the sound to the score – it was the relationships that they created that really made it. At the paper there are times when they all don’t like each other, but they never purposefully create animosity or barriers just because they don’t like each other. With the police there is anger about the difference in jobs, but there is never the kind of stonewalling that most movies of this type employ. This kind of synergy in an ensemble cast as strong that this one is very rare and, I think, goes to show just how powerful director Kevin Macdonald’s vision was for this film.

I still remain surprised at just how good this movie turned out to be, but I am certainly glad that when I stood at the multiplex with some friends on Saturday night, we picked this movie out of the hat as the evening’s entertainment. Movies like this don’t come along very often and it certainly seems that there was significantly more time since the last one. Head on out and see it. You won’t be disappointed.