Old News

‘State of Play’ and ‘Sugar’ use compelling templates with mediocre results

By Elise Nakhnikian
I love a good newspaper movie. By that I mean a smart, fast-moving story with lots of moving parts, like The Paper (1994), The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), or His Girl Friday (1940). Movies that capture that odd mix of cynicism and idealism that fuels a healthy newspaper, not to mention the verbal jousting, the friendly and not-so-friendly competition, and the sense that getting the story right really matters.
   But those movies have something else in common: The most recent one is 15 years old. When this century’s 24-hour news cycle ended the reign of newsprint, newspaper movies became old news — and that’s one of the problems with State of Play.<</i>br>    The filmmakers try hard to make their story relevant. They pair Cal (Russell Crowe), the old-school reporter on the print side of a powerful Washington, D.C., newspaper, with Della (Rachel McAdams), a young woman who blogs for the paper, so the two can exchange some superficial banter about old media vs. new. They also link the death Cal and Della are investigating to a private military contractor whose goal is “the privatization of homeland security.” But you’ve seen everything here done before — and probably better.
   Director Kevin MacDonald knows how to make a story compelling. Touching the Void, his 2003 documentary about two mountain climbers who narrowly avoid death in the Peruvian Andes, made skillful use of re-creations to dramatize the survivors’ stories, and Last King of Scotland, a fictionalized tale about Idi Amin, was suffused with a mounting sense of dread. But he’s lost his mojo here.
   The score is so intrusive and ineffective that Ben Affleck joked about it when he plugged the movie on The Daily Show. The dialogue feels recycled, and the closest we get to character development is watching scruffy, puffy Cal scarf down junk food while cranking up an Irish drinking song in his old Saab.
   Maybe because it’s based on a British miniseries with more time to spin the story, the movie is stuffed with underdeveloped plot twists. Not only is Cal reporting on the death of a congressman’s assistant, but he’s protecting the congressman, Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), who happens to be an old roommate. What’s more, Cal once slept with Collins’ wife, and Collins was having an affair with the dead assistant. Then there are killings related to the case, that defense contractor, and dirty dealings as Congress caters to corporate interests.
   Rather than being pulled into the action as Cal and Della race to piece it all together, I just wanted to get out of the way while the kitchen sink hurtled past.
    There are no guns or glitzy plot twists in Sugar. The second feature by husband-wife writer/directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson), who fly their indie freak flag high, this is the story of a charismatic young man who uses baseball as his way out of poverty in the Dominican Republic.
   It’s a great idea for a movie — in fact, much the same story was masterfully told in The New Americans, a multi-part documentary that aired on PBS in 2004 and is now available through Netflix. But by observing their main character instead of getting inside his head, the filmmakers made me feel almost as uninvolved in his story as I did in Cal’s.
   When we first meet Miguel “Sugar” Santos (Algenis Perez Soto), he’s at a U.S. baseball camp in the Dominican Republic, drilling hard every day in hopes of becoming a pro. Then he gets his big break, a chance to play in the States. “Life gives you many opportunities. Baseball, only one,” his mentor tells him. That may be the theme of this meandering movie, which follows Sugar into the minor leagues and beyond.
   Soto, who went to baseball camp in the DR before giving up on becoming a ballplayer, has charisma to burn, and Sugar is an upstanding young man, so Fleck and Boden have our sympathy from the start. But they don’t do much to build on that goodwill.
   The story is badly paced, spending too much time on the details of a baseball career that turns out to be just a stepping stone. It also telegraphs some important plot points, so Sugar’s decline as a ballplayer seems anticlimactic even while it’s happening. But it’s the distance the filmmakers maintain between us and Sugar that lost me.
   Too many of Sugar’s actions and thoughts are opaque, and Soto plays too many scenes with the same hangdog sadness. It didn’t help that a shower scene and some shots of Soto shirtless felt gratuitous, objectifying the actor.
   That distance reminded me of Half Nelson, an unconvincing story about a teenager in an urban high school who befriends her teacher, helping him kick an addiction to drugs. Shareeka Epps and Ryan Gosling did a great job, but I never bought the relationship between their characters or felt like I knew what made either one tick.
   I don’t doubt that Fleck and Boden mean well, and they choose interesting stories to tell. I just wish they knew their characters a little better.
State of Play rated PG-13 for some violence, language including sexual references, and brief drug content; Sugar rated R for language, some sexuality and brief drug use