Jack O'Connell is superb as trailblazing tabloid editor Larry Lamb, both in cahoots and at odds with Guy Pearce's Rupert Murdoch, in this tangy Venice opener, adapted from James Graham's play. In the film, the year is 1970: His words are half a century ahead of the current prevalence of “storytelling” as a catch-all buzzword describing the jobs of everyone in media from journalists to filmmakers. Lamb gave good story, for sure; so do director Danny Boyle and writer James Graham, who have fashioned the late newsman’s aggressively populist makeover of U.K. journalistic standards into an irresistibly hooky tale of sex, murder and other very bad behavior, shot and cut with maximum flash and dazzle, set to a driving punk rhythm.
If many of Boyle and Graham’s attention-grabbing tactics are straight out of the tabloid playbook, well, consider their film its own case in point — as it persuasively draws a straight-but-very-crooked line from The Sun, then newly under the ownership of Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch, to a fast, cynical, de-standardized modern media landscape, still very much in Murdoch’s clutches. People need stories, yes, but any stories? Adapted and significantly jazzed-up from Graham’s stage hit, “Ink” captures both a specifically seismic era in the British journalistic sphere —the beginning of the end of Fleet Street, essentially — and a more universal shift in how the public is fed information, or entertainment, or the ever larger and murkier in-between.
Lamb adheres rigidly to the famous five W’s at the core of the reporter’s job: “Ink” in turn asks what the hell we’ve done and where we go from here. But mostly it’s just a very compelling yarn, galvanized by a terrifically bullish performance from Jack O’Connell as Lamb, a Yorkshire-born working-class striver whose populist redirection of the then-struggling paper is presented both as a canny business move and a kind of personal vindication: a poke in the eye of the posh, fusty old boys who had controlled Fleet Street — and thus his career — up to that point. Is it vindication if it costs a man his soul?
Graham’s script, which maintains a tone at once enjoyably gossipy and queasily troubled, makes no clear pronouncements on that front. It doesn’t make a heroic outsider of Murdoch, played by Guy Pearce with oily finesse and a faint chill beneath his Aussie candor, but the ensuing moral battle between him and Lamb is an ambiguous one. The crass, dehumanizing sensationalism that became The Sun’s very successful stock-in-trade appears to emerge from a combination of the editor’s boundless pledge to give the people what they want, and the owner’s dispassionate, sometimes reluctant commitment to back whatever sells.
What that is, as Lamb determines by focus-grouping his own staff, is not that deep: sleaze, sport and sex, with a side of human interest, and the weather on page two, because they’re British, and as his uptight deputy editor Bernard Shrimsley (Patrick Kennedy) says, “That’s what I like to talk about.” It’s an obvious approach that was wholly radical at the time, even before Lamb angered the Press Council and the Church of England alike by putting topless women on page three for purely decorative purposes. Joyce Hopkirk (Claire Foy, excellent in a slightly underwritten role), Lamb’s mistress and also the most senior female journo on his staff, shrugs off such lowbrow misogyny in return for a more progressive women’s page under her control: She doesn’t like everything about the new direction, but she concedes, “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” To a point, yes. But it’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt, and when the wife of Murdoch’s deputy is kidnapped by two rogue ransom-seekers, the dangers of Lamb’s fast-and-loose journalistic approach come to the fore — as, to the consternation of the authorities, he treats this close-to-home crisis as grabby headline fodder.
When the police warn him that such invasive reporting might affect the case, Lamb counters that that’s very much his intention. Murdoch, meanwhile, wonders if his bold new hire has gone too far — and emerges, somewhat surprisingly, as this story’s dry, wary conscience. Does “Ink” go too soft on him?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
