KILL THE MESSENGER: The Film Babble Blog Review

KILL THE MESSENGER

(Dir. Michael Cuesta, 2014)

This thriller/biopic, now playing at an indie art house near me, comes off a bit like JFK Jr., and I’m not talking about John-John, the late offspring of John F. Kennedy. 

KILL THE MESSENGER plays felt like a lesser offspring of Oliver Stone’s 1991 classic of political paranoia in its depiction of a story based on real events involving a truth-seeking everyman uncovering a vast conspiracy involving a powerful governmental agency that could squash him like a bug. 

Here, a scruffy mustached Jeremy Renner passionately portrays investigative reporter Gary Webb, who caused quite a stir in the mid 90’s when he exposed the CIA’s involvement with the U.S. crack epidemic in a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News.

The first half of the film, scripted by Peter Landesman (PARKLAND) has Renner's Webb following leads about drug trafficking through interviews with Michael Kenneth Williams (The Wire) as infamous '80s LA drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, Tim Blake Nelson as Ross's lawyer, Robert Patrick as an accused drug dealer whose property was seized by the feds, and Andy Garcia as an imprisoned drug lord who Renner travels to Nicaragua to speak to.

The second half deals with Webb publishing his story and initially being hailed as a hero, on both the homefront with his wife Rosemarie DeWitt and kids, and at the office with his editors (Oliver Platt and North Carolina native Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but then getting investigated and gradually discredited by the CIA. 

These sequences of Webb's decline, involving his estrangement from his family and being holed up in a sleazy hotel room with its walls lined with photos, newspaper articles, strings-tying-suspects-together, etc, (you know, like crazy yet righteous people like Carrie from Homeland do?), are tedious in their over familiarity. 

The case that the CIA worked with Central American drug dealers with profits from cocaine sales in the U.S. used to arm the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua is a compelling one, but we're never given more of a breakdown of the mechanics that were at play. We, like Renner, are just supposed to take folks' words on these things, but a scene that intensely takes us into the operation would've been nice. I don't feel like I learned anything more about the inside workings than I did seeing the trailer.

Director Cuesta, who’s produced and directed episodes of Homeland, Dexter, and Six Feet Under, gets a good gritty mood going, but the power of the material dims as it tracks Webb’s decline. It sort of peters out.

And, again, like JFK, it has a scroll of text at the end that tells us that this guy was right about everything all along.

On the surface, this adaptation of Nick Schou’s 2006 book “Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Web” and Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series of articles, is a solidly structured film with a powerful lead performance by Renner (possibly his best to date), but its overdone conspiracy thriller framework renders it into just a cinematic footnote to what really went down.

At least this'll have moviegoers looking up stuff on the real guy online. Maybe there they'll actually learn something.

More later...

DVD Review: HOW I GOT LOST

As the season of blockbuster bombast looms it's nice to point out smaller overlooked films like this which just dropped on DVD:

HOW I GOT LOST (Dir. Joe Leonard, 2009)



When first introduced to the protagonists of this award winning indie film, I feared that this would be another good stable friend/bad manipulative friend road trip morality tale; but while it, well, kind of is, it's got much more of a soul than a cynical capsule breakdown like that would suggest.

Starting off in New York City in the days just following 9/11, Joe Leonard's feature length film debut concerns 2 friends - Jacob Fischel and Aaron Stanford. Fischel is an aspiring writer dealing with a painful breakup of a relationship that began "the day after the world ended."

Fishel explains: "Like planes going into buildings were just an excuse for us to find each other. I know how that sounds, but that's how it felt." Stanford (best known as Pyro in the X-MEN movies) is a hard drinking Wall Street banker who didn't become the business mogul he dreamed of being. 

After getting a mysterious phone call Stanford impulsively persuades Fischel to get out of town and hit the road with him. They hire a cab to Philadelphia so they can borrow Fischel's mother's station wagon and go from there, well, not far from there as they quickly run out of gas. 

On the road out in the middle of nowhere leaning up against the car in the light of the dawning sun, Stanford reveals the real reason for the trip: his father died and he doesn't want to go to the funeral alone. At the funeral Fischel's got his friend's back, but Stanford has a bit of a freak-out yelling about his disconnection with his father at the other attendees. 

With a tired shrug, Stanford leaves Fischel to handle his affairs and returns to New York. A sympathetic diner waitress played by Rosemarie DeWitt (RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, Mad Men) provides Fischel with some comfort. This is some plotting that could have been cringe worthy, but is measured and moving - there is tangible chemistry between Fischel and DeWitt and Leonard makes good use of it. Though the characters are directionless, the film never feels so.

Fischel's voice over narration, coming from the book or whatever he's typing out in his apartment in the last third of the film, comes close to the edge of pretension, but never falls over and lands there. The score by Georgian singer songwriter Kaki King also successfully skirts around overly melodramatic methods.

Despite some inevitable heavy handedness, especially when dealing with a post 9/11 mindset, HOW I GOT LOST is an earnest and poetic work, grounded in realism, and beautifully filtered through the fear we all felt nearly a decade ago. We all got a bit lost as priorities were redefined or destroyed and our communal spirit desperately needed to be re-sparked. 

The film's conclusion revolves around the Northwestern blackout of 2003, utilizing real footage shot on the NY streets during the outage. It's a fitting bookend to see the city come together via bonfires and other makeshift celebrations, while Fischel finally fixates on what he really has and what has really been lost. 

More later...