Director Michael Cuesta (“Homeland”) and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (Shame, 12 Years a Slave) have gone old school in their approach to telling the story of journalist Gary Webb in Kill the Messenger. The look and feel has hints of ’70s journalistic procedural All the President’s Men, or perhaps it’s best to say this film was most clearly inspired by Alan J. Pakula‘s 1976 political thriller. Thematically the films hold a kinship, largely in the way we can now look at All the President’s Men as a time-capsule piece when it comes to the way investigative journalism used to be treated and respected when compared to today’s 24-hour news cycle where journalists are just as likely to be the story as the story itself. In terms of quality Kill the Messenger can’t quite stand up to the comparison, but just to make the comparison alone, I think, is saying something.
Set in the mid-’90s, the story of Webb finds the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (played exceptionally by Jeremy Renner) as he comes across a story that leads him down a path to discovering some shady dealings having to do with the nation’s crack epidemic. After exhaustive research, the “San Jose Mercury News” published his three-part investigative series “Dark Alliance”, alleging the United States government used money from the sale of crack in the U.S. to help fund CIA-supported rebels in Nicaragua.
The news was explosive and Webb became a celebrity overnight, but as he was warned during his investigation, he soon became the story, not his work. Not only was the government denying Webb’s claims, but major newspapers from the “Los Angeles Times” to the “Washington Post” were going through pain-staking efforts to poke holes in Webb’s story and began digging into his own personal history.
When looked at as a companion piece to All the President’s Men and exploring the difference in investigative journalism in the twenty years that separate the two stories and then the nearly twenty years since Webb’s story broke, it just goes to show how far downhill journalism has fallen. Now the big question is to ask if Cuesta has managed to deliver a movie as intriguing as its subject matter and that’s where Kill the Messenger is a little hit and miss.
Written by one-time investigative journalist Peter Landesman (Parkland), the film definitely hits all the right beats. The importance of the subject matter is not lost and it’s obvious Landesman holds plenty of sympathy for Webb, whose story enters some dark territory of its own, the latter years left to a postscript at the end of the film, but not at all lost on the audience once the credits begin to roll.
There is, however, an issue when trying to find a balance between Webb’s work and family life, something All the President’s Men didn’t even attempt to touch upon, but it’s necessary here as Webb’s family is affected by his investigation in a lot of ways. While his home life feels true with Rosemarie DeWitt playing his wife and Lucas Hedges doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to their three children, it often feels as if it’s injected out of necessity rather than organically. Yet, many of the moments between the Webb family are very good and one of the main reasons a scene later in the film where Webb finds a guy snooping around his car is so effective.
The question to ask is What’s the main focus of the story? Is it Webb? Is it his work? Or is it what the title alludes to, which is the decision by not only the government, but mass media to turn its focus on Webb as opposed to the explosive story he’s uncovered? These are questions I’m not entirely sure were asked before Kill the Messenger went into production because it seems to me it’s the last one the story seeks to focus on, but it gets lost every so often along the way.
That said, I can’t help but admire this film greatly. Cuesta and Bobbitt clearly have a great admiration for classic storytelling. One specific scene I absolutely loved was a fantasy sequence as Webb is about to receive an award for Journalist of the Year. It’s scenes such as this that show the true intent and focus of the film and what Landesman and Cuesta set out to get across, and while it sometimes gets a little muddled and forgotten, thankfully some great moments remind us of how important the subject matter is.
Couple that with talent such as Renner and DeWitt, along with the likes of Barry Pepper, Michael Sheen, Mary Elizabeth Winstead playing Webb’s editor and Oliver Platt as Jerry Ceppos, the paper’s executive editor, and you have an excellent ensemble and a film that ends up just a little wide of the mark, but still very honorable in its attempt at hitting it.
