Delayed Reaction: State of Play

Premise: A reporter investigates a conspiracy involving his Congressman friend.

 

It's odd for me to miss a movie like this. While I haven't seen every movie out there, my focus has largely been high profile modern American films, including Oscar bait. State of Play fits each part of that description. I truly don't know how it snuck by me. I often confuse it with Body of Lies, which I haven't seen either. Maybe in my brain I canceled them out somehow.

 

Anyway, State of Play came out in 2009. It's based on a 2003 BBC mini-series and it shows. This is a packed movie. It even plays like it's being told in chapters. Kevin MacDonald and company do a great job condensing it all down to a little over two hours, but it could use some time to breath. Had the series been adapted in 2019 not 2009, it very obviously would've been a mini-series that's just set in the U.S. rather than a film. Limited series have attracted almost everyone in that cast at this point anyway. It would hardly look like slumming it for TV. Also, by 2019, no one was making these mid-budget thrillers anymore. In 2009, this was already the last of a dying breed.

 

I really can't get over this cast. By my count, 8 people have had Oscar or Emmy nominations since this came out* with a 9th if you go back to include Russel Crowe's Oscar. It's crazy that they have Viola Davis, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Doubt, in a medical examiner role for a scene or two. I found out later that there was some reshuffling of the cast, and that makes sense. Russel Crowe has that hair, not as a choice, but because he was about to shoot Robin Hood and was called in at the last minute to replace Brad Pitt. Ben Affleck was replacing Ed Norton too. Crowe and Affleck don't really register as the same age. There's an 8-year difference that's exasperated by the fact that Crowe has always looked grizzled and Affleck is baby-faced. Everyone on an acting level is fine though in a procedural way.

 

*Affleck (Argo), McAdams (Spotlight), Mirren (The Last Station & Phil Spector), Wright (House of Cards), Daniels (The Newsroom and others), Viola Davis (too many to count), David Harbour (Stranger Things).

 

Other than the lazy complaint that I'm more interested to see the mini-series version of this story, I liked this movie plenty. I've seen too many thrillers to really be surprised by the movie (I knew the handful of different ways it could go without knowing exactly which one they'd choose), but sometimes it's nice to just go along with the beats. I love a newsroom movie that talks about how papers are dying yet has a protagonist who is gainfully employed without writing that much. It's also cute to remember the days when the online portion of the news site was treated as a joke. And a well-placed self-righteous comment about journalistic integrity leaves me swooning. It's was so refreshing to find a movie that felt like a movie on TNT in the early 2000s that's I'd lose an afternoon to.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend