Review: Kill the Messenger

"National security and crack cocaine in the same sentence. Does that not sound strange to you?" Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) wonders in Kill the Messenger, an engrossing look at the journalist who uncovered, and then was undone by, the CIA's involvement in the Central American cocaine business.

Buzzing with the feel and spirit of a Seventies political thriller, the film is actually set in the mid-1990s. The Reagan administration's war on drugs and the Iran-Contra affair were fading from the public's consciousness when Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Gary Webb published a piece for the San Jose Mercury News about the DEA seizures of alleged drug dealers' property. When his editor Anna Simmons (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) excises the last paragraph of the article before publication, he urges her to reconsider, arguing that the victims may be drug dealers but they have the right to due process.

The article gets noticed by Coral Baca (Paz Vega), a gorgeous bombshell who dangles an enticing carrot in front of Webb: a confidential grand jury transcript detailing the government's use of a former Nicaraguan trafficker Danilo Blandon (Yul Vazquez) to help bring down drug kingpin "Freeway" Ricky Ross (Michael K. Williams). The information comes as a surprise to Ross's lawyer Alan Fenster (Tim Blake Nelson) and a shock to Ross himself, who says that Blandon was his main supplier. Blandon was raining so much cocaine on him that "I couldn't sell it fast enough to keep up with the supply." During Blandon's testimony, he's forced to admit that he and his partner Norwin Meneses (Andy Garcia) were in communication with the CIA, who were well aware that they were selling cocaine to buy guns and supplies to support the Nicaraguan rebels.

Webb's publisher Jerry Ceppos (Oliver Platt) has reservations about the magnitude of the story - the San Jose Mercury News is a local paper after all - but gives Webb the go-ahead to travel to Central America to secure an on-the-record interview with the incarcerated Meneses. The resulting three-part exposé "Dark Alliance" sends shockwaves through the public, especially the African-American community who are angered that the government intentionally addicted blacks to crack cocaine. Webb, now a sought-after guest by the various media outlets, notes that he never made that particular claim, only that the CIA-trained and supported Nicaraguan Contras were funded by the drug dealers responsible for the influx of crack cocaine in America's inner cities.

Such nuances are lost amidst the blowback. The CIA go into denial mode, but the greater damage comes from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, who are irritated that some small town paper has scooped them on their home turf. Buckling under the barrage of accusations that Webb's article was insufficiently sourced and fundamentally wrong, Webb's paper withdraws their support and essentially pushes him out the door. Ceppos is no Ben Bradlee, the famed Washington Post editor who defended Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from similar criticism when they broke the story on Watergate.

Like All the President's Men, which chronicled Woodward and Bernstein's investigative efforts, Kill the Messenger is propelled by the nuts and bolts of the fact-finding, of the dogged way bits of information are uncovered, and how those scraps create the whole story. The film is enormously sympathetic to Webb but perhaps tilts it too much in his favour; was it vindictive nitpicking or did his article contain valid problems?

Michael Cuesta directs the film like another installment in the Bourne series, not necessarily a bad thing, and lets actors like Garcia, Williams, Ray Liotta, and Robert Patrick shine in their one or two scenes. Renner delivers his best performance to date, rebelliousness and determination giving way to dejection and obsession. The sense of tragedy is palpable - you recognise that something essential has been lost within him.

Kill the Messenger

Directed by: Michael Cuesta

Written by: Peter Landesman; adapted from Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" articles and Nick Schou's book Kill the Messenger

Starring: Jeremy Renner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Oliver Platt, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Tim Blake Nelson, Michael K. Williams, Paz Vega, Yul Vasquez, Barry Pepper, Ray Liotta, Robert Patrick