The Screengrab : traffic

Screengrab Review: "State of Play"

Nick Schager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

A 2003 BBC miniseries condensed from six hours to two for its big-screen Hollywood adaptation, State of Play is so bursting with characters, plots, and hot-button subject matter that some unavoidably receive short shrift. Though its English TV heritage and multifaceted current events-laden narrative both recall Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, Kevin Macdonald’s (The Last King of Scotland) film nonetheless largely eschews Big Statement grandstanding in favor of murder-mystery tension. It’s a tack that can occasionally be vexing, as some of the issues this tale nominally addresses would surely benefit from further investigation, whether it’s the increasingly edgy relationship between traditional and new media, the role of corporate interests on news reporting, and – in an echo of this season’s 24 storyline – the rise of profit-first private military contractors in international affairs and homeland security. Yet Macdonald’s decision to use these topics primarily as flavoring for a tale of nothing-is-what-it-seems espionage and investigative journalism is, ultimately, a shrewd (if disappointing) one that keeps the focus on suspense and prevents the taut, knotty proceedings from overreaching.

In the nation’s capital, a thief and pizza delivery man are shot dead by a skilled killer, while at the same time, the aide (Maria Thayer) to married congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), whom she was both screwing and working for as the lead investigator of a Senate committee hearing into Blackwater-esque private military contractor PointCorp, is mysteriously killed by a subway train. Washington Globe reporter Cal McAffrey (a scruffy, long-haired Russell Crowe) is assigned to cover the first deaths but – given that Collins is his former college roommate, as well as married to a woman (Robin Wright Penn) whom he once slept with – inevitably begins looking into the latter case. What he unearths is a tangled web of duplicity, corruption and murder fit for a Raymond Chandler yarn, and one he’s tasked with figuring out while contending with an editor-in-chief (Helen Mirren) under pressure from the paper’s bottom line-driven new owners and a staff blogger named Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) eager to work the story alongside her renowned peer. Double crosses, assassinations, and treachery soon engulf the plucky reporters, and as they breathlessly sift through facts, rumors and revelations, Macdonald’s film achieves suitably swift momentum, the twists and turns coming fast enough to keep one distracted from the obvious, telegraphed denouement lying in wait.

Jeff Daniels, Viola Davis and Jason Bateman round out a sturdy all-star cast that’s asked mainly to embody familiar archetypes, and if Crowe’s hero is less compromised than the script would like us to believe – his severe conflicts of interest never truly putting his noble motivations in serious doubt – the actor’s driven performance nonetheless anchors the vigorous action. That, underneath its flurry of characters and incidents, State of Play adheres to a familiar All the President's Men-style whodunit template is for its first two-thirds inconsequential, since Macdonald keeps the shadowy proceedings brisk and thorny enough to mildly intrigue. Unfortunately, all the commotion is primarily in service of a seen-from-miles-away bombshell that renders the plot – and its half-baked but unpretentious portrait of the insidious influence of private entities in what should be public services (government and media) – far more shallow than it initially appeared. Although, even if the film proves nothing more than a clever, diverting bit of smoke and mirrors, its end-credits depiction of the start-to-finish process of newspapers’ daily creation serves as a poignant coda for the vital yet dying art of old-school, courageous, truth-telling reportage.

The Second (or Third, or Fourth) Coming of the 1970s Movies

Phil Nugent — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Ross Douthat thinks that moviemakers have brought back the '70s, again. But when Tarantino and other filmmakers of a certain age set out to redeem the '70s as a cool decade after all, they fixated on the stylistic tics and mannerisms of gritty urban thrillers and genre hybrids such as blaxsploitation flicks, and what's been brought back now, in direct response to the Bush administration and its cheerleaders in the media, is the paranoid hopelessness of such Vietnam-and-Watergate-era pictures as The Parallax View, The Day of the Condor, and the vigilante genre epitomized by Charles Bronson in Death Wish. This is not how it was supposed to be. In the wake of 9/11, there were a lot of predictions, both inside the industry and in the press, that audiences would now reject cynicism and violent thrills and embrace the second coming of John Wayne, a simple man with a simple plan to solve all our problems, starting with wiping that smirk off your face, and do me some push-ups, smart boy! (Remember that "irony is dead" horseshit?) But the few overt attempts to play to this "new reality" — say, that remake of The Four Feathers that didn't do anybody any good, or that documentary about "good Americans" that was marketed as a bitch slap to Michael Moore — died a dog's death, and the more cunning of the filmmakers who might have once considered catering to it got with the program. As Douthat points out, after the failure of Tears of the Sun, a 2003 movie about some American special-ops guys in Nigeria who remember what they're really fighting for and who proceed to, well, really fight for it, its director, Antoine Fuqua, was back last year with Shooter, in which a special-ops guy who's back from the Middle East discovers that he's really fighting a conspiracy made up of sleazeball U.S. government guys — plutocrats who disregard the laws, sneer at the common people, and the depth of whose villainy can be accurately gauged according to the degree of their physical resemblance to Dick Cheney. Audience who ate it up may not have been conscious of responding to having their political prejudices stroked, but it was a much bigger hit than Tears of the Sun without being a much better movie. Also instructive: the career of Stephen Gaghan, who made a splash with his screenplay for Steven Soderbergh's (pre-9/11) Traffic, which summed up the war on drugs as a misguided, empty enterprise, but did also allow for the existence of a few good people working inside the system and scoring whatever little victories they could. Since then, Gaghan made his debut as a writer-director with Syriana, commonly referred to as "Traffic with oil instead of drugs," but which has a much more paranoid vibe, and which ends with its most intelligent, good-hearted, and plugged-in characters — its best hopes for positive change — literally blown off the road. It's the difference that makes Syriana feel like a product of the current zeitgeist.

The James Bond of the current era is Jason Bourne, the killing machine who, having lost his identity, starts out knowing nothing except that the world is out to get him. Over the course of three very busy pictures, he's yet to learn anything that might cheer him up. (The closest thing to good news in any of the Bourne pictures is that an amnesiac with a target on his back might still be able to hook up with Franka Potente — but he won't be able to keep her for long.) Even the Napoleon Solo of the current era, 24's Jack Bauer, though regarded by some as a right-wing hero standing almost alone in the liberal fantasyland that is topical-minded Hollywood, is at odds with the pasty-white, Nixonian government leaders who, more often than not, are at the bottom of the latest villainy he has to bust. (Jack's real "ideology" amounts to a bland willingness to do anything to anybody to get his way, in a universe where torture works. Like many a self-identified law-and-order type, he's not a real conservative so much as a barbarian with a cell phone and a muscle shirt.) But because the similarities between the '70s and today have more to do with a shared national mood of fatalistic helplessness than with the specifics giving rise to that mood, the "new '70s" atmosphere works best when the filmmakers skirt the issue of just what it is they're mooning about. So last year's slate of "Iraq war" movies had a beside-the-point feel to them, and even the vigilante-hero template doesn't have the same impact when transferred to contemporary New York — a place that certainly has its problems but that, compared to the city Travis Bickle called home, is relatively bloodless and well-scrubbed. (As Douthat points out, "Jodie Foster’s gun-toting avenger [in The Brave One] alone would have been responsible for more than one percent of the city’s annual killings." The anxieties of the '70s movies were part of something not just huge but pervasive, a societal rot that you couldn't miss — you couldn't leave home or turn on the news without being reminded of it. However bad things seem now, they don't seem out of control — if anything, just the opposite — and most people probably assign most of the blame squarely to one or two powerful people whose guts they hate. So the movies that try to take on society's ills head on feel as if they'd fit all too snugly onto YouTube.

That Guy!: Miguel Ferrer

Peter Smith — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 20:00:00 GMT

Miguel Ferrer had some big shoes to fill before he was even old enough to walk. His father was the Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer; his mother was recording star Rosemary Clooney. His oldest childhood friend is Carrie Fisher, his sister-in-law is Debbie Boone, and his cousin is George Clooney. With expectations that high, it’s probably no surprise that he shied away from the intense pressures of film work and found his niche as a television actor; he’s just signed on to a recurring role in the Bionic Woman remake, but he’s also turned in memorable TV roles in Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, Tales from the Crypt, Crossing Jordan and LateLine (as well as, er, less grand projects like Kung Fu: The Next Generation). He’s also won acclaim as a voiceover actor, doing everything from Disney (he was a featured actor in Mulan) to superheroes (a lifelong comics buff, he’s been in several Superman animated episodes and will play a prominent role in the upcoming New Frontier Justice League cartoon) to video games (he plays the lead in BioShock, one of the moodiest, most dramatic, and immersively cinematic games in history). Ferrer didn’t initially want to be an actor at all; turned off by the hyper-competitive nature of the film industry, he was originally a respected studio drummer (playing alongside the legendary Keith Moon in one memorable session) and took his first acting job only because childhood friend — and current bandmate, in the Jenerators — Billy Mumy talked him into it. Twenty-five years later, Ferrer, whose reputation for playing short-tempered, hotheaded jerks belies his abilities as an extremely versatile actor who can handle as much emotional range as he’s given, has become one of an elite group of television actors whose very appearance in the credits is good enough cause to give a show a chance. But despite his infrequent big-screen appearances, he’s still done enough with his few and far-between movie roles to make him a That Guy! favorite.

Where to see Miguel Ferrer at his best:

ROBOCOP (1987)

If it weren’t for the presence of Kurtwood Smith (with whom he’d co-starred three years earlier in the deeply weird JFK assassination caper Flashpoint), Miguel Ferrer would have entirely stolen this highly subversive, hugely entertaining Paul Verhoeven satire right out from under leads Peter Weller and Nancy Allen. As corporate sleazeball Bob Morton, he gets off some of the movie’s best lines before being outflanked by Ronny Cox, who’s an even bigger corporate sleazeball than he is.

TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (1992)

Cursed with a convoluted production history, a number of studio compromises, and a difficult continuity, David Lynch’s big-screen prequel to his classic cult TV show is worthwhile if for no other reason than it gives Miguel Ferrer to reprise his finest role, as the intolerant and exacting FBI forensics specialist Albert Rosenfield. Ferrer doesn’t get as much screen time here as he did in the series, but every second of it is enjoyable as he plays this watchable combination of righteousness and insufferability to the hilt.

TRAFFIC (2000)

Not surprisingly, given its sprawling multiple storylines, Steven Soderbergh’s sweeping drama about the repercussions of the international drug trade features plenty of juicy roles for character actors (including a terrific turn from previous That Guy! Luis Guzmán). Miguel Ferrer puts in an excellent performance as the cynical drug trafficker Eduardo Ruiz, who engages in a memorable battle of wills with Guzmán’s drug agent Raul Castro, and makes the pithy observation that "In Mexico, law enforcement is an entrepreneurial activity."

— Leonard Pierce