VENICE FILM FESTIVAL
Ink (116 min.)
Verdict: Extremely colorful
Rating: Four stars
Loud, brash and smoothly edited, Danny Boyle’s Ink in a film perfectly replicates its subject: The Sun newspaper.
The story, which begins in October 1969, chronicles The Sun’s first year after new Australian owner Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) hires charismatic Yorkshireman Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) as editor.
It has been, to say the least, an eventful twelve months, with The Sun, after being, in Lamb’s own words, ‘a laughing stock’, overtaking the Mirror to become Britain’s best-selling daily (a position now, of course, long occupied by the Mail).
Adapted by James Graham from his own play, Ink is at its most enjoyable when it focuses on how Lamb and his hand-picked coterie of senior journalists go about creating a new kind of publication, where everything, even hard news, is made as entertaining as possible.
Loud, brash and smoothly edited, as a film from Danny Boyle’s Ink perfectly replicates the subject: The Sun newspaper
The editor asks his team what concerns them most, how they have fun, and on that basis (ignoring the man who in his spare time likes to translate the lesser-known plays of Emile Zola) he forges the content of his article, giving due attention to television (previously treated rather cautiously by the press), football, astrology and sex. And he promotes reporting on that great British concern, the weather.
It all seems obvious now, but back then it was groundbreaking work, driven by Murdoch’s fierce hostility to the British establishment, although even he is shocked when Lamb, obsessed with figures of circulation, turns his attention to a different kind of figure in the form of the girl.
O’Connell is very good as Lamb, although Pearce’s Murdoch is perhaps a little too cautious at times.
Claire Foy is excellent as the newspaper’s women’s editor, Jules, a fictional amalgam of certain famous Fleet Street women, who gives the best she can in the testosterone-soaked newsroom of The Sun.
By the way, the film’s spectacularly profane language taught me a few Italian swear words on Wednesday, thanks to subtitles at the 83rd Venice Film Festival.
Ink opens in the UK on January 8.
