State of Play
Posted by Gary Sundt on May 6, 2009
Russell Crowe looks intense while Ben Affleck looks slightly confused in State of Play.
As Printed in The Lumberjack on April 23, 2009
by Gary Sundt
I like Ben Affleck. Yeah, I said it. I don’t care if he is sort of doofy or cries in every single movie he’s in or just looks like the definition of chiseled Hollywood A-list idiot. So what if he was in Pearl Harbor? We all make mistakes. Affleck is a solid performer, and when placed in the right roles, he has the potential to do great things as not only an actor,but a writer and director as well.
But I digress. This is not an ode to Ben Affleck. This is a review for State of Play, the new film starring Affleck and the much more respected Russell Crowe. The film is an intelligent and calculating thriller that finds adventure in the trashed offices of a busy newspaper office and mystery and intrigue in the halls of Congress. Crowe is Cal McAffery, a slobby yet slick-talking journalist assigned to investigate the torrid love affair between his old college buddy, U.S. Representative Stephen Collins (Affleck), and the congressman’s aide (Maria Thayer), who were in the middle of an investigation into a company named PointCorp before the aide met the unfortunate end of a subway train, seemingly by accident or suicide.
PointCorp is a rather cloak-and-dagger organization, what with being in the business of government contracting for mercenaries in Iraq, so Cal doesn’t buy this so-called “accident.” Neither does Stephen, and together they start to think a conspiracy is afoot. Cal’s editor (Helen Mirren), who is interested in selling newspapers, allows him to follow his nose, and she sticks rookie reporter Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) at his side to find the truth. Also in the mix is Anne (Robin Wright Penn), the congressman’s wife, who has been friends with Cal since college, and possibly something more.
A government conspiracy seems pretty much guaranteed, with potential witnesses and insiders being snuffed out left and right, but only the key players believe it to be possible. There are perhaps one too many sequences of loud yelling, where everyone tells Cal how wrong he is. This has a lot to do with the rules of the journalistic thriller genre, because only the hard-nosed journalist with a good heart can see the truth, and everyone else is a doubter.
State of Play manages to follow every step in the conspiracy playbook as it hurdles toward its conclusions, but it throws in an effective amount of twists to make the film riveting almost from start to finish. The script by Tony Gilroy, Michael Matthew Carnahan and Billy Ray is both familiar and original, even while some of the dialogue is too overwrought for even the top-notch actors to properly handle. For the most part, however, the performances are solid, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto adapts effectively to the shaky cam style of director Kevin Macdonald, adding to State of Play’s undeniable atmosphere.
Without specifically spoiling anything, I feel the film’s weakness is in its ending, which might seem shocking and complicated to the untrained eye, but to me comes off as too clean and pretty. The resulting feeling is a movie on autopilot. State of Play is a well-made motion picture, and everyone involved does a fine job, but all the yelling and atmosphere in the world can’t replace that spark Macdonald, Crowe, Mirren, Gilroy, McAdams and even Affleck have experienced with equally great concepts that were made into even better films.
