State of Play

"...with a twist you'll never see coming."

It was Thursday evening and I was watching the trailer for State of Play on television.

"Oh, really?" I said outloud. The statement was a big challenge. As I walked into the theater the next morning in Tyngsboro, bright and early for the pre-noon four dollar showing at the AMC, I began tallying up generic possibilities for the aforementioned "big twist." Among them are:

1. A character who appears to be benign turns out to be malevolent and powerful (the most common type of twist, found in many noir films, e.g. The Maltese Falcon (1941)).

2. A character who appears to be malevolent turns out to be benevolent and helpful (less common, but often entertaining when pulled off, e.g. in Charade (1963)).

3. Somebody unexpected gets killed (shocking when done right, the canonical example being Psycho (1960)).

There are other kinds, of course, but I figured the twist in State of Play would be one of the three types above. My self-assigned task, in response the challenge of the tv trailer, would be to identify the character in advance. It would be my little parlor game during the movie.

In the open minutes, I was full of hope. A man stumbles through an alley in the Georgetown section of D.C. An assassin appears. A woman is killed on the subway, in the midst of a crowd. Links appear to a Congressman involved in a critical investigation of the defense industry. The twists would surely be entertaining and juicy, given the set-up.

Without giving too much away, it turns out that the twist did indeed catch me by surprise, but only because it was so underwhelming. While I was on the lookout for really high-level mind-blowing twists, a blazing curveball, the story threw me a lousy change-up that crept by at forty miles an hour.

The story as a whole significantly underdelivered. The high concept of the narrative purports to be a conspiracy involving high-level corruption in the federal government in connection with a paramilitary contractor that is manifestly based on Blackwater Worldwide. It doesn't get much better, and more topical, than that. There are killings in a web of intrigue. There are signs pointing to very high levels.

And then it just sort of fizzles at the end.

It brings to mind something I've noticed about Hollywood. For all the collective imagination put into these stories, Hollywood is amazingly conventional and unimaginative when it comes to conspiracies. At one point, one of the characters openly scoffs at conspiracies in government, and the story actually upholds this. The conspiracy dissolves away, more or less leaving Blackwater and the federal government off the hook. Instead all the machinations turn out to be the result of a rogue player who really isn't that powerful. The conspiracy is microscopic and pitiful.

It is exactly parallel to the situation involving horror movies: Hollywood is brain-dead, afraid and unable to actually look into the dark corners of our collective psyche. Instead it has become a mechanism for turning our attention away from these dark corners. That is why our horror movies suck (and why they have to be imported), and this is also why many thrillers suck as well.

State of Play wasn't a total disaster. A complete rewrite of Act Three could have turned this into a decent, and even superior, story. There was a mildly interesting (but rather surface) theme involving old line newspapers vs. the blogosphere. The acting was decent all around (fans of Jason Bateman will appreciate his offbeat supporting role).

There was also a rather strong but subtle component of the narrative involving the oft-seen theme of intergenerational relationships. Specifically there are two such relationships, between a middle-aged man and a younger woman, shown in contrast with each other, unhealthy vs. healthy. The unhealthy "dark" one was a married Congressman (Ben Affleck) involved in a secret sexual liaison with his young aide. The secrecy of the relationship is actually the toxicity that drives the intrigue of the story.

The healthy relationship is the out-in-the-open, non-sexual (but erotically-tinged) mentorship by a veteran unmarried investigative reporter (Russell Crowe) of a fresh-faced news blogger (Rachel McAdams).

The contrast between the two relationships is the part of the movie that actually worked very well, through many subtle touches and plot-stitching of comparisons. Just as the destruction of the toxic relationship drove the intrigue, the building of the unhealthy journalistic relationship is what solved it. That's good storytelling. I could have written this entire blog entry about the way the two relationships were constructed in opposition to each other. It probably should have been promoted to the main theme of the movie.