KILL THE MESSENGER

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An Incomplete Investigation
Gary Webb’s Story Gets Short Shrift

Investigative journalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It never was. “Big scandal” stories like the one broken by real-life San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb, about the CIA’s funding of the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. on a massive scale, fell mostly on deaf ears when Webb’s powerful series of “Dark Alliance” of exposé articles appeared in 1996.

Only outraged local communities in Los Angeles took direct action. Black community groups demanded answers for the CIA-enabled drug conspiracy that decimated their neighborhoods. Of course, by then most or all guilty members of the Reagan administration — including old Ronnie himself — were happily retired and living off the fat of the land, beyond the law. Authoritarian lip service was paid, nothing more.

Webb’s explosive reporting on the government’s hypocritical actions related to “smuggling tons of cocaine into the United States” came under attack from all sides. Petty jealousy and calculated indolence on the part of big newspapers including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post hung Webb and his findings out to dry. Rather than assigning their own journalists to follow up on Webb’s incendiary reporting, American media attacked the man who put his own ass on the line. No big-paper editor wanted to concede that a reporter from a relatively insignificant paper like the San Jose Mercury could scoop them on a story containing earth-shattering revelations.

As is shown in the movie, the Washington Post adopted a government-puppet stance dedicated to discrediting Webb’s reporting rather than seeking to verify his findings. That the film doesn’t bother with the finer points of Webb’s journalism is a problem.

Director Michael Cuesta sets the table with archive television footage of U.S. Presidents, from Nixon through Reagan, condemning drugs. Even former First Lady Nancy Reagan gets screentime for her notoriously insipid “Just Say No” drug campaign. We are hooked.

The ever-redoubtable Jeremy Renner plays the newspaper reporter and family man Gary Webb with detailed attention to the athletic physicality and fearless attitude that street journalists typically possess. Renner’s portrayal is the best thing the movie has going for it, aside from its civilian espionage aspect. 
The flirtatious girlfriend of an indicted drug lord supplies Webb with a confidential file that points to the inveterate seizure of suspected drug traffickers’ property by the DEA. The partially redacted grand jury transcript relates to Nicaraguan drug lord Danilo Blandon and his links to the Contras and to the CIA. Webb takes the bait and travels to Nicaragua for some on-the-ground research.

Although competently directed, “Kill the Messenger” hopscotches through aspects of Webb’s professional and private life without sufficiently fleshing out either. It’s impossible to know by screening the film whether the screenwriting or editing is to blame, but many crucial elements go missing.

Questions lurk about the fact-checking support of Webb’s two-faced Mercury News editor Anna Simons (played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead). More to the point are the alleged holes in Webb’s reporting that the CIA and media outlets seize upon to discredit him and his articles.

“Kill the Messenger” is a frustrating movie. It fails both as a brief biopic and as a political thriller. It works somewhat as a sketch character study, but that’s not enough to satisfy a movie audience.

At a time in history when investigative journalism has been marginalized so much that hardly anyone notices or cares, tragic stories like Gary Webb’s only support the sad reality that America’s police state spooks have won, and will continue to win with a fog of propaganda and some well-placed bullets. The movie does however remind us how amazing it is that heroic whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are still fighting the good fight. Some messengers live longer than others.

Rated R. 112 mins.

THE FIFTH ESTATE

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Character Assassination Made Fun
Wikileaks Movie Cheats With Style

Pre-panned — after reading the script  — by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, “The Fifth Estate” is a visually stunning introduction to the origins of a news organization that revolutionized journalism. As much as the film’s dramatic liberties play with the real life nitty-gritty aspects of its elusive subject, it will provide food for discussion for years to come.

Juicy tidbits abound. Julian Assange dyes his famously white hair white. In the early days of WikiLeaks, Assange ran the organization practically by himself while pretending he had “hundreds” of volunteer hackers helping him. Whether accurate or not, this is sexy stuff. Director Bill Condon (“Kinsey”) knows exactly how to place dramatic emphasis on the context of such details surrounding the globetrotting days of the now-exiled publisher of classified documents — namely those brought to light by Bradley Manning in 2010.

Based on two books [“Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” and “WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy”] that Assange decries as “discredited,” the movie plays like a spy thriller on steroids. With its quick-cutting of headline topics and splashy shots of foreign locales, the opening credit sequence is enough to make politically savvy audiences salivate. Condon’s evocative use of impressionistic imagery — such as a “Brazil”-inspired vision of rows of endless office desks adds to the film’s dynamic sense of bureaucracies collapsing via their own greed-fueled mechanisms of economic skullduggery.

The film calls attention to its purpose by framing Julian Assange as an “antisocial megalomaniac” — something Benedict Cumberbatch worried about in an interview with “Vogue” magazine. The fact that the story is witnessed through the eyes of WikiLeaks volunteer Daniel Domscheit-Berg (wonderfully played by Daniel Brühl), a person who was “not significantly involved” with WikiLeaks after 2009, points to an inherent fictionalization of events, possibly at the behest of corporate interests. “The Fifth Estate” is a Disney [Dreamworks] production.

It is telling that Daniel Domscheit-Berg profited significantly from the sale of the film rights based on a book he contributed to via ghostwriter Tina Klopp. The film falsely states that Assange has been “charged with rape” in Sweden. Assange would not have been granted political asylum if that were the case. Most confusing is a repeated bit of obfuscating subtext that claims that Julian Assange and his family were members of a cult when he was a child — something he has staunchly denied.

Here is a very entertaining Hollywood movie packed with propaganda attempts to tarnish Julian Assange in an inherently personal way. Like the majority of bogus or slanted information disseminated by the American media, “The Fifth Estate” leans more on fiction than on fact. However, that’s not to say audiences won’t get their money’s worth from it.

Benedict Cumberbatch delivers an Oscar-worthy performance, as does the always-intriguing Daniel Brühl. You owe it to yourself to see the movie if only to see what a Hollywood hatchet job looks like. It’s pretty, seductive, and very effective if you aren’t comfortably predisposed to reading between the lines.

Rated R. 124 mins.

CAPTAIN PHILLIPS — NYFF 51

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Man Overboard
Paul Greengrass Weighs the Toll of Capitalist Survival

The grueling 2009 kidnapping suffered by U.S. cargo-ship captain Richard Phillips comes to tangible life in Paul Greengrass’s nonstop nail-biter. Nerves will be rattled.

Regardless of the audience’s political opinions regarding the underlying justifications of the Somali pirates (fishermen who overtake ships carrying millions of dollars worth of goods after illicit dumping of toxic waste along the Somali coast by Western corporations destroyed the fishing industry), “Captain Phillips” provides a clear viewpoint on human despair and the outlandish lengths to which the U.S. military goes in order to rescue just one man.

Tom Hanks returns to form with a vengeance, after a string of less than impressive outings. “Larry Crowne” or “Cloud Atlas,” this is not. Hanks lets his highly-skilled character’s Boston accent lead him as captain Phillips, a family man living in Underhill, Vermont, who takes his job seriously — very seriously. A car-ride conversation with his wife (Catherine Keener) makes an impact. The subtle expository scene binds us to Hanks’s meticulous protagonist with an empathy born of familial dedication and humility. Every time Rich Phillips ships out, he and his wife know that he may not return. He takes nothing for granted.

Not one to waste a second of possible preparation time, Phillips calls for a lockdown drill when his ship, the Maersk Alabama, enters dangerous waters near the Horn of Africa. Coincidentally, his loyal crew’s attention to their protective measures comes just prior to two “skiffs” containing Somali pirates approaching the giant cargo-laden vessel. From the relative safety of the bridge, Phillips gives orders to speed the ship and make five-degree corrections.

This is “real-life” — not a drill. Some ingenious walkie-talkie fakery helps lessen the encroaching danger. Despite their size, the shipload of unarmed crewmen remains shockingly vulnerable to a handful of crazed gunmen with dollar signs in their eyes.

We get a procedural crash-course in defensive nautical maneuvers as the Alabama crew turns on hoses aimed downward off the sides of the ship. The hoses’ spewing water promises to sink a skiff as it gets near enough to the side for the pirates to extend a ladder they’ve brought to board the vessel. As fate has it, one of the hoses points upward, providing a chink in the Alabama’s ambiguous armor. Within minutes, the armed pirates infiltrate. Many shots are fired. The Alabama’s unarmed crew of roughly 24 men hide, huddled together in the ship’s boiling hot engine room. Captain Phillips and his fellow commanders stay on the exposed bridge.

With the outstanding assistance of cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (“The Wind that Shakes the Barley”), Paul Greengrass provides a micro/macro visual context for everything. Complex aerial shots give a sense of the impracticality of the pirates’ mission. Here is a David and Goliath struggle that soon puts David — as represented by Somali pirate Muse (well played by Barkhad Abdi) face-to-face with a man he perceives as a living embodiment of the Western avarice that has ruined his community’s livelihood. Muse is more than ready to match wits with his perceived enemy regardless of the outcome. The ever-tightening connection between the usurping captain Muse and the more intellectually equipped Captain Phillips becomes a primary narrative focus — even more so than the obvious rescue story at hand.

The film’s weakest link lies in composer Henry Jackman’s over-stated musical accompaniment. Pulsing radar beeps and low rumbling heart-beat-timed bass tones push the film’s score into a cartoonish soundscape. For such an inherently suspenseful atmosphere as a hijacked giant ship on the high seas, Jackman’s music slathers on sound where natural source-sounds would have been far more suggestive. Nonetheless, “Captain Phillips” is a gut-wrenching tale of real-life survival that will leave you wiped out.

Rated PG-13. 134 mins.