Ink Review
Danny Boyle’s Ink follows media mogul Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb through the first year of The Sun’s tabloid reinvention.
Jack O’Connell as Lamb in Ink. Credit: Anthony Dickenson. Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
Ink is director Danny Boyle’s latest film, made from a screenplay James Graham adapted from his own play. Boyle injects plenty of bombast into a movie that doesn’t benefit from it. He tells the story of The Sun’s transformation while missing the mark on connecting it to the origins of our current news landscape.
The film chronicles the first year after Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) buys the paper and hires Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) as editor. Murdoch tasks Lamb with turning The Sun into the best-selling paper in England and eclipsing The Daily Mirror, the reigning juggernaut. Lamb sets about doing it by spitting in the face of the establishment, upending norms, and reshaping the paper around news as sensationalist entertainment.
Lamb’s descent into the cesspool of tabloid news that he creates isn’t sufficiently motivated by the writing. He’s popping pills, but is that enough to sell his decline? Shaping the paper begins as a fun team effort with his staff, until suddenly it’s not and he’s going too far. The turn feels abrupt and unconvincing, even with his brief show of doubt over exploiting the kidnapping of the wife of Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde), Murdoch’s right-hand man. There just isn’t enough to sell the turn. We constantly see the paper’s sales improving on the ever-present yarn line-graph in Lamb’s office.
(L to R) Guy Pearce as Murdoch and Jack O’Connell as Lamb in Ink. Credit: Anthony Dickenson. Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
Guy Pearce’s Rupert Murdoch is too far on the periphery. The movie places the paper’s direction squarely on Lamb’s shoulders, presenting the revamped Sun as his invention. Are we supposed to believe Murdoch bears so little responsibility? The institutional problems aren’t just the result of Lamb’s moral collapse. Murdoch is depicted as a reluctant participant, always protesting until he sees the sales numbers. I don’t believe that. The real Lamb later recalled Murdoch telling him, “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it.” That’s not a statement from a man with moral qualms.
Boyle clearly disapproves of our media landscape as reinvented by The Sun. He doesn’t do enough to give deeper insight into that transformation beyond Lamb’s story. Boyle ends the film with a montage of censored later front pages from the paper and Fox News clips, accompanied by disclaimers that the production didn’t have permission to show them. These are intercut with social media influencers, the bottom-of-the-barrel stuff birthed from The Sun’s legacy. There’s no real connective tissue between the movie’s events and that montage. “This is what happened, and years later here’s the result,” with no further examination.
(L to R) Jonathan Hyde as Sir Alick McKay and Jack OConnell as Lamb in Ink. Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
Boyle’s stylistic flourishes feel unmotivated. The movie opens with a halftone effect over the first scene; a little on the nose, but I assumed it would become a recurring visual motif and thought it could work. It never comes back. The film often uses canted angles, but in scenes that don’t benefit from the sense of tension or imbalance the technique produces. Boyle also brings back the rotation rig technique he used in 28 Years Later for a single scene that isn’t elevated by it.
Ink depicts events and a legacy worth interrogating, yet Boyle does little to examine either. The stylized surface sheen he gives the film doesn’t make up for the shallow treatment of the paper’s reinvention and influence.
Claire Foy as Joyce Hopkirk in Ink. Credit: Anthony Dickenson. Courtesy of STUDIOCANAL
Ink
Boyle’s stylistic excess can’t compensate for Ink’s shallow treatment of The Sun’s reinvention and its influence on the news landscape.
Danny Boyle’s Ink follows media mogul Rupert Murdoch and editor Larry Lamb through the first year of The Sun’s tabloid reinvention.