Most of the time, journalism is not that exciting (trust us, we know). But these movies do a superb job of making the business look glamorous, dangerous and fun.
We mean the 6hr. BBC miniseries, not the Russell Crowe-Ben Affleck remake opening today. Both are about the murder of a woman connected to a prominent politician, and a dogged news team’s search for the truth while fighting off the police, the government and powerful corporations with lots to hide. But the original — written by Paul Abbott and directed by David Yates — is much more vigorous and comprehensive in showing how journalists get a big story, wheedle details out of sources and fight their natural instincts to defend a friend who’s also the subject of an exposé.
Among the added perks in the BBC version: Polly Walker, world’s most desirable woman, as the politician’s estranged wife, and Bill Nighy, purring sulfur as the paper’s harried editor. This twisty mystery is also a hymn to old-fashioned journalism — the kind where the drudgery of digging for a story, not spitballing on a blog, wins acclaim, readers and self-respect.
Many of the best newspaper dramas — Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View — are really detective stories, where the reporter takes the place of a cop to sleuth out the truth. Zodiac is based on a real case, about a serial killer in San Francisco in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Real cops were on his trail, but so was a Chronicle political cartoonist, Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), who went outside his beat, tracked down leads over a dozen years and gradually settled on a plausible suspect.
Director David Fincher is as obsessive as Graysmith; the movie is a mosaic of tiny details, smudged memories and a journalist’s intuition. Put together, the pieces form the image of a killer — and a larger portrait of the lone, dogged print reporter as hero. Take note, please, all of you thinking of canceling your subscription to your local paper.
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