Ink, review: everything is so bad that even Rupert Murdoch doesn't seem so evil anymore

In the collective imagination that he himself helped to shape, Rupert Murdoch was one of the greatest antagonists of the twentieth century. An enemy of modesty, of moralists but also of morality, he is the founder of a media empire that was the beginning of what today seems like the very end of journalism in the classical sense, or perhaps in its entirety. His audacity, his ruthlessness in business, and his political alliances then made him the evil inspiration for a series of extremely influential works on contemporary culture. So much so that today it is impossible to say where the memory of the golden age of The Sun and Fox News ends and where the inception that products like Succession made of his myth begins.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Murdoch and his eagerness to shape public opinion also reached the theater with a small London production intercepted by Danny Boyle, which inspired the opening film of the eighty-third edition of the Venice Film Festival: Ink, yet another film that takes care to celebrate what journalism is no longer and to suggest that it might soon disappear, once again celebrating its cinematic funeral.

Unlike films like Spotlight or September 5 – other illustrious representatives of journalist films that have passed through Venice over the years – Ink does not celebrate professional ethics nor does it recount the harshness of the profession in its human component, but rather tells how, after decades of resistance, a director succumbed "to the temptation that has always existed to produce shoddy, scandalous, murky information." To transform the English press from a stiff voice of morality into a ruthless pursuit of record circulations, a pair of undesirables was needed: on one side, the Australian entrepreneur who "is not serious" and is continually ridiculed for his origins by the great Anglo-Saxon publishers; on the other, Larry Lamb, held hostage like other colleagues by the impossibility of realizing his ambitions within The Mirror, the most widely read newspaper in England and the world in 1969. Each has something the other wants, and to get it, they must endure something they do not appreciate: Murdoch feels more like an editor than an owner and would like to transform The Sun into a major newspaper without all the scandalous parts necessary for the rapid growth he desires; Lamb must first accept the humiliation of doing low-level journalism to fulfill his dream of directing a newspaper, only to then hit upon a formula that shifts the focus from information to business, to the immoderate search for record circulation, for vindication dictated by numbers and not by authority.

Ink is a story that intertwines journalism and business in what would later become the stringent and priority logic of copies sold, recounting the moment and the individuals responsible for transforming information into pure business first, and secondly into revenge against an establishment that, rather than guarding powerful interests, cemented their untouchable status, frustrating the ambitions of those who had the qualities to emerge but, like Larry, were of too humble, too provincial origins and too eager to truly achieve their goal.

From Steve Jobs to Rupert Murdoch

In a particularly successful period in terms of quality for his career, Boyle returns to tackle a genre that has not brought him particular luck in the past. Eleven years ago, he directed Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender, one of the most beautiful and ruthless portraits ever made of a Silicon Valley magnate: a biopic that managed to cut deep into the character's flesh, portraying him in all his moral ambiguity, without losing his humanity. Despite the excellent result, that film went practically unnoticed.

The approach in Ink is very similar: Murdoch and Lamb are never portrayed solely as unscrupulous businessmen and professionals, but as male personalities frustrated by the contempt of the English establishment and by a self-assured approach that hides a profound need to feel accepted and worthy of their origins, of their role models. Murdoch hires Lamb, telling him that he will become the laughingstock of Fleet Street, the historic home of London's printing presses that print newspapers for the nation, but that he will have the opportunity to try to pursue the Mirror's primacy in a newspaper that replaces the duty of staid information with the pleasure of banner headlines, exclamation points, racy page six photographs, and the titillation of readers' lowest and most immediate instincts.

The film tells the story of the journalistic canon's overthrow that Lamb orchestrates, once he too manages to break free from the mindset of chasing the class leader, the Mirror. No longer the notions the reader needs to be informed, but exaggerated, gut-level ones that satisfy the public's primal pleasure of reading about what they secretly aspire to: weather, brutal sports, sex, crime reported as a mystery, gossip about television personalities.

Jack O’Connell and Guy Pierce perfectly dislike each other

The putative protagonist of the film is Larry Lamb, a kind of intelligent useful idiot who is particularly manipulable precisely because of his eagerness to prove his worth, to get his revenge. Playing him is Jack O’Connell, who in the last two years has strung together a series of extraordinary supporting roles (Sinners, 28 Years Later) and who demonstrates, if ever there was any doubt, that he has broad enough shoulders to carry a film. The most interesting discussion, however, is the one that provides a direct and explicit portrait of Rupert Murdoch for once, played by an excellent Guy Pierce who, after The Brutalist, is now specializing in the role of manipulative magnates who want to own not only objects but also talents. In the end, Boyle chooses the most predictable and narratively functional solution: at the center of the film is a relationship between two men who barely mask their professional, human, virile frustrations, bringing out the most functional worst in each other.

The lesson of Steve Jobs and its failure, however, seems to resonate in the film, which in its second part decides to lean towards a more conventional, more engaging narrative, only partially capturing the extraordinariness of that first media experiment. Emblematic, in this sense, is the specious addition of Claire Foy's fictional character Jules, the feminist journalist who works at The Sun and, to advance her agenda, creates The Willy Wall, when photos of scantily clad people begin to appear in the newspaper. Why soften a world that made its rampant sexism a point of pride? Is it not a disservice to place a morally almost irreproachable female character in a world also depicted by the lack of female characters, except in the centerfold of racy photos?

The revealing shortcomings of Ink

The film then deliberately chooses to make slight allusions to two crucial and emblematic issues of that period: the beginning of incessant and ruthless media coverage of the royal family and the transformation of crime news into a gruesome and gossipy narrative. These are two issues of enormous relevance that are barely hinted at, just as another major absentee changes the balance of a film that is born and dies on Fleet Street, never leaving the newsroom group, sometimes even the premises themselves. The circulation of The Sun remains nameless, faceless: the public that embraced the lack of values, Lamb's "up and ready for the average Joe" line, is missing, almost as if its corruptibility is a given and irrelevant.

These are three stylistic choices that lead to a paradoxical result: if not exactly positive, Murdoch does not emerge as the Mephistophelian character we are used to hearing about. With Ink, Boyle almost seems to suggest that what came after is so atrocious in journalistic and human terms, that our present is so dark and diabolical that there might be something to regret in that unscrupulous era, yet still fueled by a genuine, immoderate love for the profession of journalism. Larry is to blame for having opened a door, but for Boyle, those who came after him truly crossed the line.