James Y. Lee
Do I have your attention? Fantastic. If you will—do stay for some thoughts on a film about the crassness of these sorts of tabloid techniques, a paradigm shift in journalism that appealed to our baser instincts and became all the more profitable for it. And yes, the elephant in the room will be addressed, too.
One thought lingered in my mind as I was making my way out of Danny Boyle’s Ink, his Wolf of Wall Street-esque riff on the origin and rise of UK tabloid The Sun—when was the last time we’ve ever seen Danny Boyle this energized? Something about the rather aggressive way Boyle renders this story feels earnest in a way that his work hasn’t in quite some time; the praise that emerged from its world premiere at Venice felt like an indication of a return to form. In a way, that’s certainly proved true. Boyle is shooting for grander ambitions here, a journalistic Oppenheimer with wide-ranging thematic resonance that we likely haven’t gotten to see for a film about this particular industry since Shattered Glass.
The story of The Sun is certainly a worthwhile one to tell, if not solely for the sake of potentially explaining how we’ve gotten to a modern era of ubiquitous disinformation. Journalism as a pillar of accuracy and morally reliable reportage has been profoundly challenged, a responsibility pushed off to the surviving bastions of legacy media, and the stories of increasing urgency those outlets have been forced to provide as a result. Boyle’s thesis is clear with Ink—our current era of relying on crass leaders who serve the lowest common denominator came from somewhere. And when it comes to Fleet Street, the hub for journalism and the press in London, it spawned with two imps from Hell—Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) and Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce). These men were disinterested in journalism by integrity; they knew they were running a business, and they believed sales were the truest objective measure of a paper’s success.
That shared spirit between Lamb and Murdoch is hashed out over lunch one day in the ’60s, leading to the formal creation of The Sun as a paper, with Lamb serving as editor, and Murdoch overseeing its operations. They assemble a ragtag group of over 120 staff members, with Jules Davies (Claire Foy) among the first to join their ranks, carrying visions of creating a women’s section for the paper. But they’ve got fierce competition from the entire rest of Fleet Street, including premier publications like The Daily Mirror, hailed universally at the time as the leading newspaper in Britain—and all of them are willing to make an example of The Sun‘s advent. It’s not like Lamb makes himself a difficult target, either. When it becomes clear that The Sun is doing remarkably little to distinguish itself, even on a basic aesthetic level, from the Mirror, Lamb draws the ire of Murdoch and the mockery of all of Fleet Street, culminating in an awards ceremony where Lamb is publicly humiliated and walks out, furious and indignant at being perceived as Murdoch’s puppet.
But Murdoch recovers Lamb’s spirits in the end, telling him to push forward with his conviction—and so Lamb does, finding every way he can with his assembled team to ensure that The Sun is a universally appealing paper. That means: a dedicated focus on sex in paper; an entire swath of pages dedicated to sports; a section about TV where such coverage used to be rare; all of which are scaffolding for an insatiable appetite for gossip and titillating ways to frame the daily news. In the process, we watch as The Sun‘s sales begin to skyrocket, framed through colored lines of thread on a bulletin board in Lamb’s office, marking the sales rankings of each Fleet Street paper over time. And likely through splayed fingers, we also watch as Lamb pushes even further with each controversial story that emerges, unwilling to compromise on the ethical lines that The Sun shatters with precedent-setting force.
Nearly every aspect of Ink on a formal level is loud and aggressive, rarely willing to take a quiet moment when it comes to Lamb’s full-steam-ahead approach to ensuring The Sun‘s success. Dutch angles and whiplash-inducing movements abound in Alwin H. Küchler’s cinematography; Fin Oates’ editing frantically cuts away on multiple occasions from Lamb’s mainline story to interstitials like The Sun‘s headlines, flashbacks shot in entirely different formats, and the roaring of the printing presses’ machinery; all while Simon Hayes’s sound design and Daniel Pemberton‘s score audibly accentuates the noise of the unceasing press cycle. It’s not only the kind of formal noise we’ve missed from Boyle since his earlier works, Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire chief among them, but also the kind of noise that complements the sheer crassness of Lamb and Murdoch’s endeavor. Alas, though, it also makes any quiet moments that do emerge—for instance, Davies’ short monologue at point to Lamb about her faith in the reflective power of the news—feel wildly out of place as a result, executed with relative sincerity but surely bound to ring false in the face of the film’s relentless commitment to noise.
O’Connell and Pearce are the duo to watch throughout Ink, walking in lock-step towards their characters’ entrepreneurial, ethical bridge-burning spirit, but diverging in terms of what it is they’re burning those bridges for. Pearce starts off as the more apparently detestable of the two—who doesn’t know about Rupert Murdoch’s reach in the American press at this rate, especially in the wake of Succession?—even if he’s retooling his work as megalomaniacal and industrially wealthy Harrison Lee van Buren from The Brutalist with an Australian accent. But O’Connell, who’s made a name for himself with the 28 Years Later films and as head-vampire Remmick in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, finally gets his hour to shine as a lead. His Larry Lamb is English journalism’s riff on Fincher’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, a man so completely committed to humiliating those who’ve mocked him, that such a base, primal desire leads to him burning the rest of the world down. He already has a burning passion to lead a newspaper when we see his first meal with Murdoch, but what even Murdoch doesn’t expect is the force with which Lamb lurches forward, like a shark towards blood, when he smells the prospect of legitimate gain and profit—and O’Connell turn towards the soulless is as fun to watch as it is menacing.
The ultimate question that arises from a film like this—so willing to gaze into the pit of our worst instincts, to charge it with a relentless kind of energy—is a matter of what all of this is ultimately for. And while certainly a convincing portrayal of The Sun‘s culpability in our regressive modern news culture, there are points where Ink falters enough into biopic territory to lose sight of characterization. Films like this have often found themselves having to wrestle with a critical weak link; how do they create characters that feel dramatically meticulous and purposeful out of events that actually happened? Boyle comes relatively close to a potential answer by leaning all the way into his two protagonists’ worst instincts and finding deeply primal, simplistic reasons for their avarice and unstoppability. But by the time the other shoe drops, with a series of scandals and crimes that bring The Sun‘s credibility pointedly into question, the film might feel as though it’s veering into a more rote events-based progression. And too eagerly, Boyle pivots his story back to The Sun‘s financial success despite those events, without much developed insight into how it affects Lamb or Murdoch as characters in the process—an admittedly minor issue in the face of a much more apparently egregious decision.
Yes, Boyle has confessed to the use of generative AI images and videos in Ink. No, the instances of its use are not difficult to spot. Not unlike Late Night with the Devil‘s use of generative AI for its interstitial graphics, or the equally misguided use of AI for hypnotized dreamlike backdrops in last year’s A Private Life, Ink uses AI to animate black-and-white photos that show certain groups and figures related to The Sun. Even on its face, the choice is a deeply misguided one; if the film had the resources to recreate Fleet Street throughout the ’60s and ’70s, then it surely had the resources to recreate images from eras further in the past. But even further than that, the awareness of AI’s presence in Ink infects the entire rest of the film: it forces audiences to potentially spot where else generative AI emerges in the film; it creates skepticism for scenes that were human-made that may lack a certain amount of attention to detail; the rumor mill is still running strong about where else in the film it may have been utilized.
Ink is, for the most part, earnest about wanting to show how journalism shifted for the worse—where the dominant attitude of media coverage now belongs to the influencers, to short-form content, to crass inflammation and titillation with no esteem for a code of ethics. It also knows that the people in power who drove us to this point aren’t motivated by anything sophisticated; there’s nothing complex about Lamb’s avarice, about his greed, about the simple desire for more. But what hypocrisy, in the end—that it would be such an engaging portrayal of this inflection point for the deterioration of journalism, and yet would itself dabble in the AI technology responsible for what else but the convenient proliferation of disinformation. How disappointing it is that a film portraying the mainstream journalism industry, whose corruption it both mourns and mocks, has become an unintentional harbinger of just how much worse things are about to become from here.
