Every now and again, a great film falls through the cracks. Kill the Messenger is one of the year’s very best but is not quite getting the critical or commercial respect it deserves, and I doubt most people have even heard it.
What Works: The movie is the true story of Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner, awake again after years of big budget work), a newspaper journalist who discovered that the CIA was complicit in drug trafficking during the Reagan administration so they could fund covert operations in Nicaragua. The first half is the story of how Webb stumbled across this and unraveled the conspiracy, but it’s the second half that might divid folks. Once the story breaks, people start coming after Webb personally and the movie wants to show the toll that investigative journalists are under.
What I loved is how it highlights that a lot of the “big” papers (The New York Times, L.A. Times, and especially The Washington Post) weren’t just sloppy in not breaking this story themselves, but barely made an effort to cover it after it already broke. Instead, they chose to focus on Gary himself and railroad him. The movie is trying to get at exactly how hard it is to be not just a whistle-blower but a real journalist in this age where media seems too cozy with the interests it should be going after. Watching 60 Minutes has become “Government Weekly” and the idea of journalism in this movie and in real-life is that they go talk to the NSA director for official quotes about spying rather than really digging into stuff.
What Doesn’t: I think most people will be enthralled with the first half of the movie and the conspiracy it unravels, but may start to lose interest with the second half which is more about real journalism stalling out and the cost to Gary of reporting this story.
What I Would Have Done Differently: There’s something a little slight and TV-movieish about the film’s overall look and style, but it’s still one of the year’s very best and worth watching. Don’t miss it.