The crowning achievement of Miloš Forman’s still somewhat overlooked biopic ofHustlermagazine founderThePeople Vs. Larry Flyntis its tight grasp on the performative nature of morality. In the claustrophobic home of hypocrisy, all walls are made of glass. WithInk, Danny Boyle’s own shot at profiling acontroversial media mogul, the director is so swept up in underscoring his understanding of the slippery concept of press morality, he ultimately becomes proof of the problem.
The year is 1969. Neil Armstrong takes one small step for aman, one giant leap for mankind; 400,000 people gather in muddy fields at Woodstock to define the next decade’s counterculture; Charley Kline types two letters to Bill Duvall that will balloon into the internet. In London, Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) has dinner with Jack O’Connell’s Larry Lamb at Rules, the oldest restaurant in London. The two sit beneath aTurner depicting aboat docking at sunset – the striking orange paint makes it seem like the world is on fire. When the two media men finally strike adeal, you can hear the kindling catchlight.
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Inkchronicles the early days of The Sun under Murdoch’s ownership and Lamb’s editorial reign. Once his hefty check is signed, the new editor-in-chief goes on apoaching expedition, with the film’s official synopsis referring to the resulting group of journalists as “visionaries and misfits”. Those are fancy words for crooks and ghouls – the only ones money-hungry enough to embark on aseemingly impossible mission: to turn the slow-selling, long-mocked tabloid into the best-selling newspaper in Britain.
When defining the new visual identity of The Sun, Lamb throws classicism out of the window: we’ll have crooked indents and white text on ablack background, thank you, sir. Graphic signs, splashes of red, all either bold or italicised. More, more, more! That same aesthetic principle guides Boyle’s extravaganza; angry guitar riffs blast through the cinema speakers while the camera flips people on their side as the press does to words on paper, characters often held at an angle that amplifies the feeling of disorientation.
Much like the paper it chronicles,Inkis all style over substance. It plays as an ineffective plea by adirector regurgitating the fresh transgression of his career-makingTrainspottingand tweaking it slightly to malign not just the rampant consumerism that further exacerbates the gaps between the haves and have-nots, but the entire system of power — and its propagandist mechanisms — that form the foundation of this rotted modern world.
Boyle’s hyperbolic form only exacerbates James Graham’s overwritten adaptation of his own stage play, where men repeatedly pontificate questions of press freedom and the place of print journalism while women – with Claire Foy’s pantomime reporter Jules Davies as its main representative – are relegated to delivering zingy lines about sex that are meant to reveal them as fully formed human beings but only further tighten the box of conservatism that entraps them. This old-school structure speaks to Boyle’s rigid view of Britain too – one still mired in clichés of whispered desires, numbers written on folded napkins and ageneral attitude of we know what we like, and we certainly know what wedon’t.
Perhaps most egregiously, Boyle sets the scene for an evisceration of the mighty Murdoch, but never quite lands akilling blow; astupefying dialogue between Murdoch and Lamb in aflash forward towards the film’s conclusion (directly preceded by ajarring AI-generated Margaret Thatcher) proves we’re going round in circles. Boyle’s reliance on flashy gimmicks over sharp observation becomes even more apparent in afinal montage that sees the filmmaker pat himself on the back in one last showcase of self-importance; asour ending for afilm that initially sets out to condemn this very tendency.