With the familiar monuments of Washington, D.C., looming over a lengthening string of murders tied to politics, State of Play roams the same ground as such classic, paranoid 1970s thrillers as The Parallax View and the reality-based All the President's Men. Like the latter, the heroes are a pair of reporters, and the backdrop is an administration that gave rise to the worst fears. Although George W. Bush is never mentioned, State of Play was conceived in the context of Halliburton and Blackwater, the chief beneficiaries of outsourcing the war on terror to private concerns.
Russell Crowe stars as Cal McCaffrey, the cocksure beat reporter whose Rolodex has more numbers than the phone book. It's a role that fits him like an old pair of jeans, a roguish and likable man who cuts the crap. When the beautiful research assistant to his old college roommate, Congressman Collins (Ben Affleck), falls under an oncoming Metro train, scandal spreads. The married congressman is exposed: He was having an affair with his staffer and the tabloids and bloggers are running with the story that she killed herself. McCaffrey suspects a nefarious plot by the Blackwater stand-in, Pointcorp, to discredit Collins, who is investigating the corporation's no-bid contracts with the federal government. The dead congressional aide seems linked to other unsolved D.C. murders.
But director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and writer Tony Gilroy (The Bourne trilogy) fall short of following the implications of their story, which grows more convoluted than compelling. More interesting than the political murder conspiracy is the role of journalism in exposing the plot.
Sitting at the center of a messy newsroom, McCaffrey represents the old ethic of digging for truth under every stone, following the trail even when the trail goes cold. His initially reluctant sidekick, Della Frye (perky Rachel McAdams), is the paper's Capitol Hill blogger, a glorified gossip columnist. She gradually gains reporting skills while under fire from McCaffrey, who is scornful of the whole notion of news blogging, with its pointless hourly postings and vast conglomeration of undernourished opinion, hearsay and unadulterated nonsense.
But the sloppy, mindless habits of some bloggers aren't the only shadows falling across McCaffrey's profession. A thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch has purchased his paper, a thinly disguised Washington Post. Perhaps the paper's editor, a no-nonsense Brit played by Helen Mirren, bears the heaviest responsibility of all as she tries to square her belief in the traditions of newspapers with the greedy, profit-driven demands of a new era.
