In the past two years, Jack O’Connell has played a vampire in “Sinners” and a cult leader in the “28 Years Later” films. But to take on the role of tabloid editor Larry Lamb, he got even more comfortable with suave, alluring menace. He’ll stop at nothing — and that means bending the rules.
It was very naughty.” Netflix’s “Ink,” directed by Danny Boyle and set to open the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 2, is as naughty as its central character. Lamb was the real-life editor of The Sun who — hired in 1969 by press baron Rupert Murdoch to help the tabloid break into the U.K. newspaper industry — pioneered such practices as publishing nude pictures of “Page 3 Girls.” He also had a knack for framing stories as lurid, sexy or gleefully partisan, all to tickle readers’ resentments and libidos. In taking Murdoch’s dark vision of the world and turning it into can’t-look-away media, Lamb was Fox News’ Roger Ailes before Roger Ailes.
And “Ink” argues that the sins of Murdoch’s newspapers created the garish world we live in, with the consent of all of us readers. Like any juicy news story, “Ink” frames a grand drama at human scale. Here, Murdoch (Guy Pearce, building on his robber-baron “The Brutalist” energy) is at first a laughingstock.
English writers and editors look down on him, calling him an “antipodean” to emphasize that he hails from Britain’s former prison-colony island. So he purchases the also-ran paper The Sun and hires Lamb, an ambitious junior editor from Northern England, empowering him to redefine the news as pulp entertainment. The partnership between two outsiders clawing their way in, joined by an equally canny journalist played by Claire Foy, comes to shape Fleet Street, the London thoroughfare where scribblers plied their trade, in Lamb’s and Murdoch’s images.
The movie is chilling in what it tells us about how we got here, but it’s not intended as a hit piece. We are all responsible for this.” “Ink” uses filmmaking vim to address tabloid intrigue. Boyle, the energetic auteur who made “Steve Jobs” and “127 Hours” into sparking, creative excavations of complicated men, is at peak provocation — and O’Connell, alternately ingratiating and hard-edged, makes for an utterly compelling antihero.
There’s an irony to a film with such a mordant view of media culture debuting on one of the most closely watched stages in the world — Venice kicks off awards season, and it’s come to rival Cannes for star power. But after a recent series of high-profile Hollywood misfires like “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Bardo” and “After the Hunt,” studios have taken a step back from the Lido, which means that “Ink,” and O’Connell, have the lane to themselves. And as the U.S. heads into the midterm elections with a growing sense of anti-establishment backlash in the air, “Ink” places politics front and center.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
