Review: State of Play

Oh America. I love you, but your desire to remake everything is starting to get a little bit grating. Did we really need a new version of “Death at a Funeral” when the original is only three years old and was written in our native language? Out of the six reviews I’ve written, I just realized that only one of them was an “original” idea. So here I go, back to the well one more time with a review of State of Play, a 2009 US remake of the original BBC miniseries.

State of Play is the story of a reporter (Russell Crowe) trying to investigate the murder of a young girl who was working for an up-and-coming congressman (Ben Affleck). The story is interesting enough, and the plot twists and turns just the right amount to keep you interested, even if you see the twists coming. One word of caution though, the ending isn’t spelled out as clearly as most, and if you don’t pay attention during the movie, you may walk away at the end not sure what happened to who, and who got their comeuppance.

Performances in this one are pretty good all around. The highlight for me was the always fantastic Helen Mirren as Crowe’s boss. She plays a character that is much more in-your-face and hardnosed than she normally does, and it works really well. I’m all for seeing Helen Mirren play a hard ass. I also really liked Ben Affleck’s performance in this one. He went through a rough patch, but it looks like he’s come out alright on the other side with quality performances in this movie, Hollywoodland, and a fantastic turn behind the camera in Gone Baby Gone. I hope he can keep this up, because I like seeing him do well.

Although the acting is great, the biggest issue that I had with this movie was that it wasn’t the original miniseries. I hate typing those words. I know that it makes me sound like an elitist asshole. I don’t mean for it to. I hate the people who are always like “The book was better” or “I prefer to watch Bad News Bears in French, as it was originally intended”. The reason I say that I prefer the miniseries is that it is six hours long. For most people that may turn them off, but I loved that it gave the writers more time to develop the subplots and flesh out relationships between the characters. In the miniseries you felt like you were taking a step by step journey along with an investigative journalist, whereas in this movie I felt like they made a lot of plot jumps without having time to fully justify them. If I didn’t know the story, I feel like I would have constantly been saying “Now, why are we going to this building? How did they know to meet them there?” In order to trim the movie by two-thirds, this version had to eliminate entire characters and plot points. One of the more interesting characters from the original (portrayed by James McAvoy early in his career) is completely missing. I realize that this is necessary to get the movie down to 2 hours, and he was probably the only main character you could cut, but it still was sad to see that character eliminated. At times it felt like you were missing out on some of the key parts of what made the original so good. If you’ve never seen the miniseries, you won't be pining for what you don't know you're missing, but for those fans of the original, you will likely be disappointed at the loss of some of the more subtle character interactions and back story.

Overall, the movie is solid. It has a few strong performances, some nice showings by supporting actors (Jeff Daniels and Jason Bateman in particular), and has a plot that is interesting enough to keep you watching. I think the writers did as good a job as they could to cut a miniseries down to a movie, but the entire affair still seems truncated. I’d buy the movie three drinks at its favorite bar on Capitol Hill, but to anyone who saw this and felt it to be incoherent or lacking, give the miniseries a try. Ugh, I hate myself.