Jeremy Renner Hits Hard in “Kill the Messenger”
By Skip Sheffield
Journalism can be a dangerous business. It can even get you
killed.
That’s the big message of “Kill the Messenger,” starring
Jeremy Renner as crusading Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Gary Webb.
Renner has twice been nominated for Academy Awards. This
time he may well win for his impassioned performance as the hothead,
incautious, rough-mannered San Jose Mercury News reporter who virtually
single-handedly discovered a link between the CIA and Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
The story starts in 1996. Webb had left Washington, D.C.
with his family after some personal unpleasantness to get a fresh start in California.
He was hired by the San Jose paper as a local stringer, but Webb’s ambitions
went far beyond that. When Coral Baca (Paz Vega), a beautiful, mysterious
girlfriend of a cocaine trafficker handed Webb a sheaf of classified documents,
Webb began to shadow shady types, lawyers and U.S. officials alike to assemle pieces of a puzzle that asked how so much crack cocaine was flooding
the streets of poverty-stricken South Central Los Angeles and other impoverised cities.
The search led him to crack kingpin lawyer Alan Fenster (Tim Blake Nelson) and
his client, crack boss “Freeway” Rick Ross (Michael Kenneth Williams), Webb was
able to convince his wary editor Anna Simons (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and even
more cautious executive editor Jerry Ceppos (Oliver Platt) to allow him to travel
to Nicaragua to grill imprisoned drug baron Norwin Menses (Andy Garcia). Webb
came to the inescapable conclusion the CIA had been turning a blind eye to the
scheme of supplying weapons to anti-Communist Nicaraguan rebels in exchange for
cocaine, in a misguided attempt to unseat the leftist Sandinista government
during the Administration of Ronald Reagan and later George Bush.
When “Dark Alliance” was published in the Mercury News, the
response was swift and overwhelming. Webb was criticized by the Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times and New York Times of exaggeration, sloppy reporting and
insufficient evidence. Webb was busted down to a bureau 150 miles away in
Cupertino.
The negative impact was not only felt by Webb and his
newspaper, but his family and in particular his long-suffering wife Sue
(Rosemarie DeWitt) and son Eric (Matthew Lintz) who idolized him.
Working from a script by Nick Schou, who wrote a book on
Webb’s “Dark Alliance,” and screenwriter Peter Landesman, director Michael
Cuestra (“Homeland”) has devised a fast-paced thriller and given Jeremy Renner
free reign to create a flawed but fearless action hero of freedom of the press.
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