State of Play
As an amalgamation of sight and sound, movies often use music to punctuate a visual sentence. Movie watchers have long since become accustomed to the welling up of soaring sentimental tunes in a weepy dramatic scene or the dangerously foreboding bass tones that creep up in horror movies. There are even some musical scores that are instantly recognizable when divorced from their accompanying visuals, such as the music from Doctor Zhivago and Gone with the Wind.
But in order to stir emotional magic, music must complement a movie's scenes, rather than commandingly control them. When music is used to lazily navigate every peak and valley of a winding plot, the result is a movie like State of Play, which relies so completely on the musical score that it begins to feel like the thriller movie equivalent of a sitcom's laugh track.
Filmmaker Kevin Macdonald directs this big-screen adaptation of the BBC series of the same name in an almost somnambulistic state. He lets the movie unfold in a workmanlike fashion and sits back as each moment of triumph, danger, and defeat is communicated through the notes of Alex Heffes' generic score. It doesn't help that the story about a group of journalists trying to solve the murder of a Congressman's mistress feels like a collection of recycled puzzle pieces pulled together to form a familiar picture.
To his credit, Macdonald has assembled a strong cast to give this otherwise lifeless movie some dramatic credibility. Russell Crowe, all dishevelled charisma, plays protagonist Cal McAffrey, an old-fashioned reporter who sees this murder story as his opportunity to test his sleuthing skills. He teams up with a young hotshot reporter named Della (played by a fiery Rachel McAdams), who is still learning the rules in the world of no-holds-barred journalism.
Also thrown into the mix is Harry Lennix as a detective irritated by the reporters' tactics and Helen Mirren as the foul-mouthed boss of Cal and Della at the Washington Globe newspaper. Mirren's presence is classy as always, but even she cannot transcend the transparent purpose of her character. With so much stuffy seriousness at work in the politically concerned plot, Mirren is used as little more than unexpected comic relief, throwing out one-liners that are only acceptable because they are delivered by a respected thespian. But while Mirren's potential as a performer remains relatively untapped for the duration of the movie, feeling a room filled up with the combined presence of Crowe, Mirren, and McAdams is at least more dramatically stirring than the paint-by-numbers plot.
The one truly weak cog in the acting machine is Ben Affleck, who does his best impersonation of cardboard to play the Congressman caught in the crosshairs of the murder investigation. This kind of stoic, glassy-eyed character is completely outside of Affleck's range of abilities as an actor. He found himself in similarly unconvincing territory when he tried to do the action hero role in the 2002 action flick The Sum of All Fears. Affleck does not have the acting chops or the larger-than-life presence to carry such considerable dramatic weight on his shoulders. As his role in State of Play grows increasingly prominent, his flat performance becomes an unfortunate distraction.
Equally distracting is the use of clichés in a movie that is already struggling to carve out its place in the annals of political conspiracy cinema. State of Play features the usual batch of professionals (detectives, journalists, politicians, and a hired assassin with a steely glare) following the usual thriller path so predictably that the movie lacks any sense of spontaneity. There is even a hokey montage that pops up halfway through the movie and shows intercutting images of the reporters making phone calls and having doors slammed in their faces. In the movie world of case-solving journalism, all you need to get some work done is a handy montage to condense your efforts.
State of Play is far from being a cinematic atrocity. It is just a limp effort content to go through the usual motions of a standard political thriller. The mystery plot is never very interesting and the surprises barely register on the barometer of narrative excitement. Macdonald's slavish reliance on the music means that every twist and turn of the plot is accompanied by an aural cue that drains the movie of any genuine jolts.
The cast is quite strong and the partnership between Crowe and McAdams is relatively engaging, but the characters often come across as pawns in this dull chess game rather than real people. The few moments of shining character work are delivered courtesy of Crowe, but these moments are too sparse to make a considerable impact. State of Play is a skeleton with no meat on its bones, a forgettable thriller bogged down by its unimaginative devotion to a stale formula.
