Kill The Messenger: a murky meditation on modern media

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/02/kill-the-messenger-jeremy-renner

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If I decide to call Michael Cuesta’s magnificent newsroom thriller Kill The Messenger the anti-All The President’s Men, it’s not merely because it also tells the true story of a tireless young investigative reporter following a vast conspiracy to its logical conclusion. It is because this lean and barbed low-budget drama is involved in a much more complex relationship with the 1970s “Paranoia Trilogy” of films by Alan Pakula and Gordon Willis.

Kill The Messenger, set in 1994-6, even opens in direct homage to The Parallax View: a door opens, a reporter stands outside, he gets invited in, and is present when police raid the building. Real-life reporter Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner, in a richly detailed performance) stumbles into a horrifying story about a gigantic, mid-1980s conspiracy by rogue elements of the CIA to flood America’s ghettos with Nicaraguan cocaine and use the profits to buy arms for the Contras. Webb follows the drug money, visits incarcerated drug lords (Michael K Williams, Andy Garcia) in California and Managua, asks lots of awkward questions, and is staggered to find himself warned off by the CIA in the name of “national security”.

The story is almost too big for his tertiary-market daily, the San Jose Mercury News, which has neither a DC bureau nor any international reach. When this story of a lifetime goes nationwide, the CIA uses its national media contacts to brief against Webb and his allegations. Webb is named journalist of the year and hits the national TV news shows, even as his sources are being warned off, his claims are inflated by others (“That’s NOT what I wrote!” he responds), and his reputation is besmirched and sullied.

The similarities with All The President’s Men are self-conscious and intended: underground parking lot encounters, nameless informants and Deep Throat types, paranoid government officials leaping off the record and the like. But here’s the difference. When it really counts, the Mercury News editorial board – its members eager to ride the story out of San Jose and into the big leagues – does not back Webb up; there’s no Ben Bradlee here, no Kay Graham. Meanwhile, the big city dailies pile on, shocked that this story escaped them and determined to debunk it with the CIA’s complicity.

The kicker, the ugliest irony – and the movie’s measure of how gutless and corrupt the American media has become – is that chief among Webb’s persecutors is the self-same home of Woodward and Bernstein, The Washington Post of All The President’s Men. Ultimately for Webb the bitterness became – tragically – too much to bear.

Cuesta and Renner (a producer), along with a cast including Rosemarie DeWitt, Oliver Platt and Ray Liotta, deserve commendation for making such a scary and bleak story so compelling, so powerful and so damning. Alan Pakula would have been proud of them.