Meet the Press

I just got back from the Washington, D.C. premiere of In the Loop, Armando Iannucci's new movie on a runup to a war that sounds suspiciously like the one in Iraq, complete with hilarious riffs on the absurd nicknames given to intelligence sources ("Do you really think he's called Ice Man?  To Mr.  and Mrs. Man, a son, Ice?") that struck me as the potential offspring of The Mouse that Roared and Dr. Strangeglove (particularly in a scene in a mediation room at the United Nations where an American diplomat declares "Don't raise your voice!  This is a sacred space!  You may not believe it, and I may not believe it, but by God it's a useful hypocrisy!")  I'll have a longer commentary on James Gandolfini's performance as an American general in an upcoming piece for The Atlantic, but one thing that struck me is that Peter Capaldi, as Malcolm Tucker, a role he plays in The Thick of It, the political satire show out of which In the Loop came, is giving the second great British performance about dealing with the media in the last six years.

The other performance, of course, is Michael Feast as Andrew Wilson in the original miniseries State of Play, which is the single best filmed description of the relationship between journalists and politicians that I have ever seen.  Capaldi's performance is manic, profane, emotionally violent, and often very funny, where Feast's is controlled so deeply that the moment he loses his composure comes as a terrible, and terribly effective, shock.  Both men display deep content for the people whose actions they are required to spin, clean up after, and obfuscate, and with good reason: in both shows, politicians are fools, slaves to cowardice in In the Loop, and to sex and violence in State of Play.  I don't know why there hasn't been a truly great movie about journalism in the United States in recent years.  I thought the State of Play remake was fun, but not even close to great.  Perhaps it's that Hollywood isn't inclined to kick journalism when it's down.  Or that American politicians who hate the press these days tend to hate it with a dull, hammer-like disregard, rather than a poisonous, personal, specific loathing combined with need, something that colors both In the Loop and State of Play (I was at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota last year when delegates at the floor began chanting "NBC" in derision and doing a kind of reverse tomahawk chop in the direction of the press box.  Strange to say the least).  

Whatever it is, Capaldi and Feast are tremendously energizing and compelling to watch, even if I do it with a whiff of nostalgia, a sense of bygone relevance for my profession.