State of Play sets itself up to be a strong contender for a now all too rare genre of film… the complicated-story but genre-simplistic morality tale as a thriller. Lumet to Pakula to Pollack to Bourne. The problem with State of Play is that it fails in this ambition on two fairly serious fronts. First, the rather great story ideas – stuff that has not yet been well done on film – don’t have enough room to breathe. If you walked out of the film feeling that you really had a sense of what internet writers are like and how they operate versus how old school print reporters operate – especially in Washington –this would have been a masterpiece. But the ambition to add in this twist, seemingly well into the life of this screenplay bouncing around in its various incarnations, didn’t make this into the true “A” story in which the intrigue thriller the reporters are working on becomes the thing that draws you into the world of these reporters and pays off with some third act thrills.
The “A” plot of this film remains a political intrigue that the reporters are chasing down. This track is also interesting. The movie that seems to be leading here is “Russell Crowe is an old-school reporter whose close ties are both his greatest asset and his greatest problem and he’s going to fight through, walking the tightrope, until we get to the story’s end and all the secrets have been revealed.” But besides the second fatal flaw of the film, which I will get to momentarily, there is a big problem with the great idea of focusing on how web reporting is infecting traditional newsrooms – or not – in that it ends up completely distracting from this story, which would have worked a lot better if it just stuck to its narrow, more traditional ambitions.
And that is the rub here, isn’t it? Both tracks of this movie are, very clearly, about The Old vs The New. The screenplay gives us both Old Media vs New Media and Old Washington vs The Hope of a New Washington. Operating on both tracks at once is a modernistic approach to a classic kind of tale. (Don’t confuse this script with Traffic, as an example, where there are many stories that tie together thematically and, eventually, in story connectors… this is not that kind of story concept.) But the film fails because of that modern ambition. If they had just stuck with the classical form, they would have been 90% of the way to a win already. On the other hand – just like in all of these battles – you have to be excited by the ambition of reaching for more. The problem with those reaches, most often, is that everything else isn’t working near perfection, every flaw in the Big Idea gets muddled and the soufflé falls.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/04/review_state_of.html