Kill the
Messenger
****
Dir: Michael Cuesta. With: Jeremy Renner,
Rosemarie De Witt, Oliver Platt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead. 112 mins. Cert: 15
Any blue-chip drama
tossed ungilded into the post-awards dead zone risks seeming like the Academy’s
cast-offs, but this one’s worth salvaging: an intelligent, rigorously
constructed biopic of reporter Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), whose mid-90s
dispatches exposed links between the CIA, South Central drug dealers and the
Nicaraguan Contras. That career-defining scoop lands halfway through Michael
Cuesta’s film, the better to observe the contents of the ensuing media
shitstorm settle about its subject’s shoulders: Renner’s unflashy, sympathetic
character work makes Webb several degrees more vulnerable than the crusading
journo archetype usually permits. Fresh from TV’s Homeland, Cuesta sustains a quietly compelling paranoia as the
powers-that-be start blurring the narrative line, while his wily performers –
Oliver Platt and Richard Schiff as rival editors, Michael Sheen as a Beltway
insider – lend unusual contour to Webb’s notes and transcripts. Not since
2003’s Shattered Glass has the
journalistic pursuit of truth been presented onscreen as such a mortally
serious matter of honour.
Kill the Messenger opens in cinemas nationwide today.
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