The Paper Chase

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In the political thriller State of Play, allegiances real and imagined are constantly in flux. Based on a BBC miniseries written by Paul Abbott, and adapted by Matthew Carnahan, Tony Gilroy and Billy Ray, the movie works to keep you constantly off-balance, never sure how deep the conspiracies run or who's in cahoots with whom. But despite of its loop-the-loop plot, it's still possible to give away how it ends without spoiling anything. It ends with paper.

The Americanized State of Play is a mash note to investigative journalism, in particular the kind disseminated with the aid of wood pulp. The massive printing presses at the movie's end have the effect of a curtain dropping across a stage. Once the story has been printed, it's over. The printed word is the final word.

The tension between old journalism — messy, costly and probing — and new journalism — quick, slick and sensational — is embodied by the Mutt and Jeff pairing of newshound Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) and blogger Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), both of the fictional Washington Globe, who are thrown together when the stories they are chasing abruptly overlap.

The intrigue begins with bodies: a murdered purse-snatcher and an apparently suicidal senator's aide, who die within hours of each other. The latter, of course, draws more attention, especially when her boss, rising star Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), breaks down in sobs when announcing her death at a press conference. But while their colleagues and counterparts start digging for evidence of a romantic link between the married politician and his young, pretty employee, Cal and Della are working darker alleys, investigating a less noteworthy death that even the police have (wrongly) assumed is yet another case of a young black man being killed over drugs.

That the two deaths play equal parts in the unraveling of State of Play's mysteries is not incidental. One of the points embedded in Abbott's original script is that a press driven by scandal is apt to chase after colorful bit players while leaving the real villains unscathed. The American version succumbs to the same temptation, reducing him to a plot contrivance. But much of the original survives the radical slimming necessitated by a two-thirds cut in running time, replacing the miniseries' sprawl with headlong intensity.

The characters have been streamlined, too, and flattened out, as well. Crowe's slovenly workaholic is a pleasure to watch, but there's not much to him, and McAdams' tenacious go-getter isn't much more fully conceived. The most satisfying characters are those we don't expect depth from: Helen Mirren's salty editor or Jason Bateman as a PR agent whose oiled-back hair suggests a species of burrowing rodent. Director Kevin Macdonald relies on his actors' charisma to fill in the gaps, a strategy that works for the length of the film if it doesn't leave much to mull over afterward.

With its massive open-plan newsroom and a key encounter set in a parking garage, State of Play explicitly echoes All the President's Men, although its mixture of public and private villainies suggests a world decayed far beyond wiretapping and petty burglary. The knights of the newsroom are barely hanging on, fending off the demands of their corporate owners and struggling for attention in an oversaturated environment. Macdonald doesn't really follow through on the chance to contrast Cal and Della's approaches to information gathering, but he does include a telling detail. Where the Globe's other sections have embossed plaques, Della's division has a piece of paper labeled "Internet" taped to a glass partition. The movie acts as a valedictory to a fading art form. Its love of crumpled paper and the slap of shoe leather (not to mention Cal's prehistoric CRT monitor) edges close to nostalgia, as if the printing presses whirring away at its end were a vanishing species. Even its murderous conspiracy seems oddly quaint, despite the fact that its prime mover has been changed from an oil company to a Blackwater-like corporation for an added dose of topicality. The damage is contained, the corruption rooted out and the little fish take the big fish down with them. Think of it as a paranoid fairy tale.

State of Play | Directed by Kevin Macdonald | A Universal Release | Opens Friday at area theaters

(s_adams@citypaper.net)