PLOT: Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), the Northern Editor of The Daily Mirror, is lured away by Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) to run The Sun, which Lamb turns into the most popular newspaper in the entire world by first embracing tawdrier stories and eventually abandoning all sense of taste and decorum.
REVIEW: If you want to know how the news became what it is today, where the old adage of “if it bleeds, it leads” is more apt than ever, Danny Boyle’s Ink should prove to be quite an illuminating history lesson. While the idea of “yellow journalism” was around long before Lamb or Murdoch got their hands on The Sun, it never went quite as far as it did under their stewardship, and now supermarket tabloid-esque writing lives on in ways Lamb, who is arguably its father, could have never predicted, in the form of algorithms, social media, and more. Yet, there was a time when the media operated under a different set of rules, not that they themselves weren’t their own kind of prison, and that’s the world we’re introduced to in Ink, which is set on the notorious Fleet Street circa 1969.
While one could look back at Larry Lamb as a kind of villain, his corruption in favor of higher circulation does have its roots in a real concern. As shown in Boyle’s film, the Fleet Street papers were a posh part of the establishment, where notions of classism meant a Northerner like Lamb and an Australian like Murdoch were never taken seriously, which led to an obsession by both men to beat those who looked down their noses at them. Their intentions aren’t portrayed as especially noble, but you do understand them—even if eventually they turned both The Sun and perhaps the media in general into a cesspool.
The acting is electric, with Jack O’Connell having another juicy role as the charismatic Lamb. More than Murdoch’s equal, he proves to be a charming, almost Faustian figure as he recruits a gang of misfit writers, including his longtime mistress (and conscience), Jules Davies (Claire Foy), a fictionalized composite character, to help him build his empire. Pearce plays Murdoch, who was then in his forties, as somewhat more humane than the man we know now, with him more prone to judgments in taste than Lamb, who loses himself as the circulation grows.
The first half of Ink moves like lightning, with Boyle opening up James Graham’s play to such an extent that its stage roots are never obvious. It’s directed with a lot of verve, while Boyle uses anachronistic needle drops to evoke the initially punk mentality of The Sun before they became bottom feeders.
The pace does start to slow down a bit in the second half, where a violent kidnapping leads to a moral quandary for Lamb and Murdoch, with more time spent on how their judgment sets them on a path they’ll never be able to go back on. As such, the pacing does slow, but even still, it remains compelling, with O’Connell’s dynamo screen presence anchoring the film in a big way.
Ink is one of Netflix’s big awards titles this fall, and they would be wise to push O’Connell in the Best Actor category. He merits it, although Boyle makes a few missteps, including two obvious uses of AI that leave a sour taste in one’s mouth, especially in a movie that’s all about ethics. Even still, though, it’s another good piece of work for him and quite entertaining.
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