Will the newsroom drama be this year’s “One Night in Miami” or can it go further in the awards race with Jack O’Connell and Pearce? Netflix wants the “ink” to dry on its Oscar prospects. Danny Boyle made his first trip to Venice with “Ink,” his adaptation of James Graham’s stage sensation, which opened the 83rd edition in competition before moving through Telluride and Toronto, with the streamer giving it a December theatrical release and a January streaming date.
The early temperature is reading warm. The subject is an origin myth of modern media: Rupert Murdoch’s 1969 acquisition of a dying tabloid called The Sun and the rapid transformation that followed. Graham, adapting his own Tony-nominated play, approaches the story with the mechanics of a heist.
Boyle supplies the velocity. The central question is not simply how Murdoch built a newspaper. It is how two men helped invent the modern attention economy that shapes all of our lives today.
Guy Pearce plays a brash, thirty-something Murdoch, an outsider with a chip on his shoulder and a plan for disrupting Fleet Street. Jack O’Connell plays editor Larry Lamb, the working-class newspaperman Murdoch pushes past every line the establishment believes cannot be crossed. Both actors have obvious awards narratives, but two very different categories to break into.
Pearce arrives two years after his first Oscar nomination, a supporting actor bid for “The Brutalist,” which gives him the benefit of recent Academy recognition. And the role could hardly be more of the moment. Murdoch is a figure many hold responsible for the fractured, combustible information environment the U.S. is living through right now and there is a particular charge in watching an actor humanize the young man who lit the fuse.
That timeliness is the kind of thing that fuels an Oscar campaign. O’Connell arrives with something different: momentum. Between “Sinners” and the “28 Years Later” films, he is coming off a stretch that has significantly raised his visibility.
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