I couldn’t help but grin as I watched State of Play, and not just because it was a first rate political thriller with a thoughtful story and compelling characters. The “over-the-top” factor was that this film represented one of the few times in cinema that I felt the aesthetic of the newspaper reporter was done correctly. Cal McAffrey, as played by Russell Crowe, is a dishevelled looking beat reporter that boasts about writing stories on a 16-year-old computer when he’s not travelling between crime scenes, gorging on junk food in his 20-year-old car. His desk is cluttered, he has little time for gossip as news or bloggers and he still believes in the power of the press.

State of Play may be the last, great newspaper movie. So many films have been built around the notion that a single newspaperman (or woman), with truth and a patient editor at their side can conquer the universe. But in the modern world of course, we know that there’s a different story afoot. Once mighty papers, one’s that have spoken truth to power for 100-plus years, have collapsed under a weight of debt and a disinterested generation that gets their news online. This movie touches on that slightly: Cal is the old guard, blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) is the new.

As a scandal breaks involving US Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) and the death of an intern he was having an affair with, the classic “sex sells” adage starts moving the newsroom of the fictional Washington Globe in a less-desirable direction. Cal is Collins’ old college roommate, but Della wants dirt and he shoos her away like a bothersome copy boy. It’s not until Cal’s own investigations into an apparent drug death tracks back to the death of the intern that Cal starts to see more in the story. It’s a multi-layered conspiracy involving corporate corruption, government collusion and a fallible public servant trying to do the right thing in spite of everything. But of course, that’s not all to the story.

State of Play instantly calls back to All the President’s Men, a book and film that launched a generation of journalists into the believing that the scoop is there if they just wait in a parking garage long enough. In a kind of homage I suppose, the film’s most taunt sequences takes place in a garage as Cal’s hunted by the guy cleaning up the loose threads, of which Cal now counts himself among. The film though is actually based on a British miniseries of the same name, and screenwriters Matthew Michael Carnahan,
Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray seem to not waste a moment in cutting the story down by a third. There doesn’t feel like there’s a wasted moment, or a beat out of place. And it’s not like the story’s running either, it’s perfectly keeping pace.

And there’s not a bum in the cast either; everyone’s carrying their weight. Crowe ably leads with a sharp eye on details making Cal a likeable curmudgeon and a typical newspaperman. McAdams and Affleck hold their own, but I think their roles are kind of marginalized by the size of the script and the story. Affleck in particular seems kind of limited in what he can emote either due to the way the character was written or maybe just some lazy acting. Robin Wright Penn nearly suffers the same fate as Collins’ suffering wife, but she manages to mine some energy playing against Crowe in several scenes. Helen Mirren is, of course, excellent as the whip-cracking editor.

Maybe I enjoyed it too much, but I still had a good time despite maybe one or two obvious gaps. Speaking as someone with a kind of affinity for the printed, (yes, I’m aware of the irony in saying that in an e-zine so don’t bother pointing that out) it’s both a tip of the hat to the reporter/hero and a fond salute to a bygone era when newspapers meant something. Hopefully, we’ve got out fingers crossed for the former option, but hey, the film deals in realism and so do I. But all-in-all, State of Play is a pretty satisfying conspiracy film, and it’s dramatic enough to make you care. So far, it’s definitely one of the best films of the year.