This year’s Venice International Film Festival kicks off with a terrific wallop of unsavoury British history. Adapted by James Graham from his own stage play, Ink relates the transformation of The Sun newspaper following its acquisition by Rupert Murdoch (an unflinching Guy Pearce) in 1969. A late montage suggests this marked an escalation in media vulgarity that led to the savage free-for-all we live with today.
The film is also a bit of a Faustian yarn. When Larry Lamb (thrusting Jack O’Connell), then northern editor of the Daily Mail, is asked to take over the editorship of the then-struggling Sun – and juice it up to Murdoch’s taste – he is, Graham suggests, initially unconvinced by the project. As the next 12 months passed, however, he became increasingly wedded to the project, ultimately celebrating the anniversary of the relaunch with the first-ever ‘Page Three’ nude. Ink would have us believe even Sorcerer Murdoch was somewhat taken aback by what his apprentice had wrought.
The talky opening scene, shot partly in imitation of halftone newsprint photographs, offers worrying signs that filmed-play syndrome might set in. But that would be to dismiss the Danny Boyle of it all. As the film progresses, cut to boldly non-contemporaneous tunes by the likes of Public Service Broadcasting and Idles, the action incorporates the wild angles and wilder cutaways we expect from this director.
The script has some respect for the chutzpah and forward-thinking nature of The Sun team. They were the first to realise that the time had long passed for tabloid newspapers – fearful of the competition – to ignore what was happening on television. Indeed, the whole mass of popular culture was squeezed into its pages. But there is no mistaking the film’s unease at the paper’s careless excesses.
Murdoch steps away from the story as Lamb gets stuck into his brief, but he returns to make clear a hostility to the powerful Fleet Street unions that will ultimately result in his shifting the operation to remote Wapping. Pearce admits the mogul’s intelligence and ultimately allows in a degree of moral uncertainty. O’Connell does a good job of grasping Lamb’s strangled attempts to neuter his Yorkshire accent. The filmmaking is, perhaps, a bit too busy at times, but this remains a rambunctious pageant on how (if this doesn’t sound too naïve) the British media lost the last strand of its innocence. Dirty, gripping, enraging stuff.