Kill the Messenger

Kill the Messenger is a dramatic political conspiracy thriller based on the true story of journalist Gary Webb. In the 1990’s, Webb was a reporter for a minor newspaper who stumbled onto a major story. Webb’s work exposed the shady origins of the crack epidemic in the 1980s and verified that the CIA used huge profits from cocaine smuggling to arm the Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua—and flooded California with drugs in the process. The film is based in part on Webb’s book Dark Alliance (1996), which expanded on his initial reporting and explores the media’s ultimate dismissal of his findings, and in part on Nick Schou’s book Kill the Messenger (2006), an account of Webb's investigations and the CIA’s smear campaign that followed.  Jeremy Renner heads up an all-star cast in this film directed by Michael Cuesta (L.I.E., 12 and Holding).

Fictionalized narrative films about real-life political conspiracies are a tricky business. It’s difficult for a feature-length movie to tell a compelling and relatable character-based story, while effectively conveying all the complex details of a lengthy investigation into sensitive, clandestine activities. The masterpiece of this genre is All the President's Men (1976). That film alters few facts in dramatizing how the Watergate scandal was brought to light, and creates a tense, linear narrative by focusing on the relationship between the two cub reporters responsible for bring in the story to light.  Kill the Messenger has a similarly daunting magnitude of minutia to convey in a short time, and it is hindered by several additional factors that the filmmakers behind All the President's Men didn’t face. By the time All the President's Men came out, everyone in America knew about Watergate, and much of the movie-going public already viewed the film’s two main characters as real-life champions of truth.  All the President's Men may be a dark, downbeat, and pessimistic picture, but its heroes are triumphant in their quest.  And because it’s the story of two very different people, whose conflicting approaches to their work complemented each other to yield the best results, the film could follow the dependably accessible and satisfying structure of a buddy movie or a love story (though with subtle, brilliant writing and direction that exquisitely conceal this construction).

Unlike Woodward and Bernstein, Webb essentially worked alone. Stories of brave lone wolves going after all-powerful foes work much better in simple, black and white genre movies that star Charles Bronson or Arnold Schwarzenegger. In complex, true-life narratives that explore grey areas with human-scale protagonists, it’s usually too much to ask an individual actor to convey everything that’s happening on their own. In All the President’s Men, Robert Redford had Dustin Hoffman to play off of. In Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), Al Pacino’s TV journalists Lowell Bergman had Russell Crowe’s whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand to cajole, protect, rant at, and fight for. In Kill the Messenger, Jeremy Renner does his best to put across key information, often arguing points with minor characters, but he’s basically on his own rubbing his head in frustration in solitary offices and hotel rooms. More troublesome for this film is the fact that Webb’s discoveries are still today mostly unknown to the public and, to the extent they are recognized, they are often dismissed or ignored.  His articles and book did little to damage the reputation of the Ronald Regan administration, and he only further obscured the public’s already hazy perception of the CIA. After his stories broke, mass media fueled the public’s false impression that Webb had uncovered a conspiracy by the government to start the crack epidemic with the intentional purpose of killing or further disenfranchising black people. That myth is still the most persistent legacy of Webb’s work, and while Kill the Messenger tackles this aspect of the story, it is too muddled a picture to triumph over any current perceptions or misperceptions we might have about this chapter in history.

While the picture starts out strong, with a terrific early sequence that culminates in a small courtroom far from the public eye, it quickly disintegrates into clichés and resorts to simplistic, overly manipulative storytelling. We get almost every stock scene and character we expect in a political thriller, which eventually makes the whole enterprise seem dismissible.  While Rosemarie DeWitt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Oliver Platt, Andy Garcia, Michael Sheen, Yul Vazquez, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael Kenneth Williams, and Ray Liotta all deliver excellent supporting performances, none of their characters gets enough screen time to register as much more than an asset or an obstacle to Webb’s muckraking quest.  Unlike Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), which took a great deal of dramatic license (and nearly four hours) to tell the gripping real-life story of an investigation into a conspiracy theory, Kill the Messenger squanders its similar potential to stir up fresh interest in an old, but still relevant and important, political story. Director Cuesta and screenwriter Peter Landesman fail to contextualize the events they depict much beyond how everything affects Webb and his family. Their film can’t get beyond the weary, past tense narrative of a valiant, but troubled underdog taken down by the system.

Like the events it focuses on, this film has a hard time connecting with audiences who should be eager for it. We should be outraged by these allegations, yet we feel an odd distance from Webb and his work. The facts that Webb uncovered somehow don’t seem to impact our lives anymore, even though they are every bit as relevant today, and could help us grapple with contemporary political situations. Are the underlying issues of the Iran/Contra scandal just too complex for our distracted, present-day minds to comprehend? Or do we require absurd levels of blatant, unabashed evildoing in our conspiracy theories in order to pay attention to them? A fascinating and consequential story exists somewhere in this material but, regrettably, not so much in this film.