Second-hand anxiety

Ben Affleck and Russell Crowe in State of Play.

The producers and director of the political thriller State of Play have been emphasizing in interviews that they had to struggle to extract a two-hour American movie adaptation of the six-part 2003 BBC television series of the same title. So far as I’m aware, they haven’t said just why they thought it was worth the effort, although, given the American film industry’s penchant for buying the rights to British properties, perhaps they didn’t feel it was a question that they needed to address.

This cross-Atlantic cherry-picking is a practice that began long before the American TV versions of The Office and American Idol. A lot of American entertainment industry execs seem to prefer acquiring movie and TV vehicles with some foreign mileage on them to commissioning original work. (Actually, in various forms, it’s an old American habit. In a sense, some of Henry James’ best-known fiction is about something like this.) It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that these remakes rarely come close to equaling the originals.

In the case of State of Play, there is a nagging sense throughout that something is missing, and not just several hours and a number of characters. The movie, directed by Kevin MacDonald, seems a little deracinated. Its action has been moved from London to Washington, and the evil, machinating international oil company has become a Blackwater-like security firm with designs on privatized governmental security and intelligence operations. The vulgar, ethically free-wheeling Fleet Street newspaper scene has been reduced to the hard-pressed efforts of a DC paper, the Washington Globe, to cover an emerging story involving that security firm and a young clean-cut congressman (Ben Affleck).

Front and center in all this is Russell Crowe as Cal McAffrey, a veteran Globe metropolitan reporter who happens on a twin shooting and eventually tumbles to the fact that his old friend Stephen Collins, the congressman, is somehow linked to all this. On the day that Collins is to begin conducting hearings on the underhanded dealings of that firm, his chief researcher falls to her death beneath a subway train, and it almost immediately becomes obvious that his relations with this young woman haven’t been confined to professional matters. An equally young Globe blogger (Rachel McAdams) approaches Cal to get “context” on this relationship and though he disdainfully sends her packing, soon the two are working the story in tandem. The movie tries hard to get some pointedly witty business into this uneasy and unlikely pairing: He is skeptical about the whole blogging thing and she thinks he’s patronizing her.

Far more, I strongly suspect, than the BBC original, this movie is really a post-Grisham reporter procedural. It takes a largely sympathetic and sentimental attitude toward the beleaguered American newspaper. The Globe has recently been acquired by an investment firm whose owners want better financial results. Where the Brit TV series reportedly depicted the wide-ranging, overlapping corruption of interlinked institutes of government, commerce and journalism, this new edition gives us intrepidly enterprising journalists sussing out and reporting on others’ evil greed.

Making reporters heroic conscience prodders is hardly a new concept in Hollywood. Nor is getting their work wrong. State of Play does both, but at the same time, it exerts a fair amount of effort at superficially achieving an accurate setting and style where the reporters’ work is concerned. The filmmakers seem to have aimed at an unglamorous milieu, but McAffrey is something of a journalistic cliché, a calculatedly sloppy, cynical pronouncer of snappy comments and comebacks. And there’s a more serious flaw in the movie’s portrayal: It’s hard to imagine any managing editor failing to raise major concerns about the propriety of letting a reporter cover a story that crucially involves a buddy.

State of Play does develop some narrative interest and tension. MacDonald has put together several pacey, suspenseful scenes, in particular, one set in an apartment building and its parking garage, but toward the end, he seems to have lost control of things. There’s a cross-cut sequence of scenes that’s slack and clumsy. The ending itself is a wimp-out contrivance.

Crowe gives a serviceably authoritative star’s performance, but Helen Mirren, as his editor, mostly barks and bitches in a role that wastes her. Affleck doesn’t really have a lot to do. (It’s hard to believe Edward Norton wanted the part.) The most interesting performance is Jason Bateman’s as a sleazy, frightened publicist.

State of Play is a modestly satisfactory two-hour pulp diversion, but it’s probably not sharp or hefty enough to make much of an impression at the box office.

Watch the trailer for State of Play