From gladiator to paunchy journalist
State of Play brims with expert performances, including Russell Crowe as a principled hack, says Andrew M Brown
24 April 2009

Russell Crowe plays an old-fashioned reporter brought up on stories of Woodward and Bernstein

What a heroic job Russell Crowe has done of getting fat for the political thriller State of Play. Crowe is gloriously paunchy, having gained four and a half stone - so say the gossip writers. In State of Play director Kevin MacDonald pays homage to the paranoid style of the Seventies, especially the films of Alan J Pakula.

Crowe plays Cal McAffrey, veteran metro reporter for The Washington Globe. His aspect and accoutrements - bulk, long hair and beard, steady snack-chomping (he eats Cheetos, Potato Buds and canned pot roast), the 1990 Saab he drives - signal an unreconstructed quality. He is "old media" - the kind of old-fashioned journalist brought up on the stories of Woodward and Bernstein who double-checks his sources and spends forever writing a story.

McAffrey's approach to news-gathering contrasts with that of his youthful colleague Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), a tyro who works on the paper's website and wears a shirt with frills down the front. The Brit editor Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren on feisty form) sums up the difference between them: whereas McAffrey takes weeks to produce any copy, Frye can churn out online opinions on the hour - and she's cheap.

Needless to say, the world of blogging unsettles McAffrey. Even the word "blogs" sounds silly when Crowe says it, undignified out of the mouth of the man who said: "I am gladiator." Yet when a cluster of apparently unrelated homicides occurs and one of the dead, Sonia Baker, turns out to be the mistress of a rising congressman, McAffrey agrees to investigate the story with Della. He gives her some leads and encourages her to pound pavements in the traditional manner: he says he's helping her "get a few facts in the mix" for the next time she decides to "up-chuck online".

McAffrey, you see, has a special interest in the murder of the married congressman's gorgeous young assistant cum mistress, who "fell" under a train in an apparent suicide. For one thing the congressman Stephen Collins (a stiff Ben Affleck) was McAffrey's college roommate _- which may strike audiences as a stretch if they care to think about it, since Crowe is eight years older than Affleck, but it's not too troubling.

And for another thing, Crowe has romantic history with Collins's wife (Robin Wright Penn), who's standing by her man. The question arises: is McAffrey truly independent? Is he searching for the truth or protecting his friends?

Ben Affleck proved himself a writer and director of intelligence with Gone Baby Gone (2007). As an actor he has the fatal quality of not being interesting. The producers originally cast Edward Norton in the role and I can't help thinking he would have made more of the part's intriguing moral ambiguity. Collins is an honourable former soldier - he fought in the first Gulf war. But by having this affair he has soiled his record. Plus, he has allowed ambition to warp his code of decency.

The political theme is the burgeoning of private security contractors as a result of the war on terror and the threat of the "privatisation of homeland security". Collins heads a committee that oversees defence spending. In particular it's investigating Pointcorp, a monstrous private security firm staffed by ex-military types. This fact - that Pointcorp employs lots of erstwhile special forces operatives - prompts McAffrey to suspect the firm of being involved in the murders. Were they trying to frighten off Collins?

Apart from Sonia, the victims were innocent bystanders. They had merely stumbled by accident upon evidence of a conspiracy. The killer "double-tapped" his victims - that is, shot them twice like a professional hit. The bullets were custom-made so as to be extra-lethal, which tells McAffrey there's a professional military connection. The trail of corruption and deceit that gradually emerges shocks even the jaded reporter.

It entangles two subsidiary characters, both super performances: Jeff Daniels is brilliant as Collins's sleek, flabby boss, Senator Fergus. And Jason Bateman does a hilarious turn as a PR slimeball, a jittery pill-popper who's on Pointcorp's payroll and who heartlessly manipulated Sonia with catastrophic consequences.

There is plenty to like in State of Play. The attention to detail, for a start. The vast, untidy, harshly lit Washington Globe newsroom, which Helen Mirren's editor can look down from her glass-walled office on the first floor, is a spectacular piece of set design. It excites memories of the Washington Post newsroom that Pakula rebuilt painstakingly in Burbank, California, for All the President's Men (1976). Then there are the expert performances, all brimming with vitality - except anodyne Affleck. Kevin MacDonald has loads of talent: he made the fine Last King of Scotland (2006).

Still, I'm not certain State of Play survives the comparison it invites with models of the genre - for example, Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975) is another one. Those earlier films seem more grown-up somehow. State Of Play lacks a feeling of fluency and the pace is uneven.

Perhaps the compressing of the plot from its original form as a six-hour BBC drama has caused the feature version to unfold in a jerky fashion. Did it even need to be this long? I couldn't help noticing that around the 90-minute point - with a half-hour still to go - neighbours in the theatre started to check their watches.