The film’s central image anticipates its tragedy: at a holiday dinner in Webb’s home, the camera pans up the long meal table towards its head. Notes after the movie’s end state that Gary Webb died in 2004, apparently from suicide. On the other hand, it works well with the idea of the movie, which is, basically, to convey a sense of Webb’s increasing agitation and desire to thrash around even while he is increasingly paralyzed. His version of Webb’s against-the-establishment affect therefore feels a touch exaggerated. Renner, whose eyes are passionate but almost boyish, is visibly not the person of the real Gary Webb-as an actor he is more likeable, more the energetic modern type. It becomes less easy to avoid their stare and its quiet accusation. His exposed eyes, like himself no longer hiding behind the screen of small newspaper journalism, grow haggard as he takes his invisible beating. At some point he cannot protect himself from scrutiny anymore. To that end, Renner’s Webb sports a pair of aviator sunglasses at the start of the film but wears them less and less as time passes. The film shows how Webb roasted as a lamb on the altar of the media and CIA, the victim of smear campaigns to discredit his work and his person he lost his family, job, and mental health. Their new developments flash into the movie so fast that it is hard to keep up, and they make it more difficult to take in the other, very differently toned biopic side of the movie.Īt the intersection of those tangled strings lies more interesting matter: Webb’s declining life, brilliantly acted out by Renner. Its documentary-history-type threads are more disorienting than helpful. The film certainly isn’t great as a thriller, and that’s partly because the structure sprawls. These supposedly more thrilling aspects of the story in fact do not command one’s attention very well. These details were adapted from the book] “Dark Alliance,” which Webb eventually wrote to defend his article after it came under attack. Look at me, these boisterous images seem to holler: I am going to tell you all these very important and scary things! About American history! About journalism! About the CIA! Part of the movie is an exposé of the US government and its collusion, via the CIA in the Reagan years, with drug dealers and the human-rights-violating Contra fighters. The beginning shots rapidly alternate between news headlines, documentary footage from speeches by ’80s presidents on the drug wars, and footage of the Nicaragua Contra fighters on the ground meanwhile, suspenseful music pounds, and headings are, fittingly, “typed” out on the screen. There is no doubt that this work tries to say a lot.
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