State of Play Review

Political Thriller Makes Good with Talented Cast, Current Issues

Apr 19, 2009 Melissa Olson

State of Play is just as much about newspapers as it is about politics.

State of Play, the political thriller from director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) is meant to be something of an obituary for the grand old business of newspapers, the world of scruffy, incorruptible journalists who dress in beaten corduroy and are out for the truth and nothing but the truth. The film’s main character Cal McCaffery (played with a deft touch by Russell Crowe) is the last of the Woodward and Bernstein-esque investigative journalists who still carry little pads of paper and have sources everywhere.

Cal happens to be the longtime friend of Senator Steven Collins (played by Ben Affleck, whose career choices seem to have improved with age), who chairs a Senate committee investigating a defense company that has been earning billions from government outsourcing. During the hearings, Collins’ lead researcher, Sonia Baker, turns up dead, and when it is discovered that she was having an affair with Collins, the national spotlight begins to shift back and forth between the senator’s professional and personal lives. And his old friend Cal tries to put aside his personal entanglements to write the story of who killed the girl.

Great Elements

State of Play is the rare film where every piece of filmmaking, from casting to music to plot, is equally excellent, balancing out an ideal whole. As Cal digs into the story behind Sonia Baker’s death, Macdonald unwinds a twisty spindle of cover-ups, violence, and scandal that keeps audiences eager to follow Cal down the rabbit hole. And unlike the more forced Ocean’s 11 movies or the recent Duplicity, these twists are done with a touch so light that we actually don’t see them coming.

But though the plot is deliciously complicated, the real story here – no pun intended – is the slow painful death of newspapers as we remember them. Cal is a dinosaur, so old school that in the hands of a lesser actor he’d be an unbearable cliché, especially compared to the paper’s attractive young blogger, Della Frye (Rachel McAdams). The push-pull between Cal and Della is the past and future of journalism, and though Della learns to walk in Cal’s footsteps by the end of the film, it’s clear that their way is ending.

The Film's Real Message

And it’s too bad, too. State of Play is adapted from a British miniseries of the same name, and while that story focused on the energy crisis, here the film’s writers wisely choose to focus on, as Collins puts it, “the privatization of our national defense.” It’s a topic that hasn’t yet been debated much onscreen, and it opens our eyes to a pretty interesting correlation in real life.

In the film, one giant corporation is buying up many smaller defense companies and creating their own army. But in the real world, the exact same thing is happening to the newspaper business today. Large- and small-town papers are being purchased by a handful of big corporations, who effectively control the news. In fact, today the only place you can still find the “out for truth” reporters that this film so idolizes is online, and they’re awfully hard to sort out from the paid marketers and the crazies.

So, is State of Play intended to be a nostalgic criticism of the state of journalism, or is it simply hypocritical? Whose side are the filmmakers on, anyway? The answer may be unclear, but at the very least, it’s buried in a beautifully constructed film.

The copyright of the article State of Play Review in Film Dramas is owned by Melissa Olson. Permission to republish State of Play Review in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.