Rollicking new film Ink makes divisive media mogul Rupert Murdoch into a hero
Studio CanalDanny Boyle's high-energy drama about Murdoch's early years in UK newspapers has opened at the Venice Film Festival – and its flattering portrayal of the man himself is causing debate.
Rupert Murdoch is one of the most influential media figures of the last half-century. One of the inspirations for Logan Roy in the TV series Succession, the 95-year-old mogul has reshaped the modern media world via his ownership of countless newspapers and television channels, up to and including Fox News.
Whether he has reshaped it for better or worse is a matter of debate. To some, he is a visionary businessman and a champion of the free press. Others believe that certain harmful parts of that free press can be traced back to his door.
This debate is touched upon in Ink, a rollicking new drama about how Murdoch established himself in UK media in the 1960s and '70s. Directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire) and adapted by James Graham from his own play, Ink opened yesterday at the Venice Film Festival to enthusiastic reviews – and some questions about whether it was too soft on the tycoon at its centre.
How the film frames Murdoch
Whereas a controversial recent dramatisation of Donald Trump's early years in business, The Apprentice, portrayed its protagonist in a less than flattering light, the Murdoch played by Guy Pearce in Ink is a plucky underdog: a fearless rebel who takes on the patronising snobs of England's outdated elite. In scene after scene, aristocratic bullies sneer at him just because he is Australian – so even when they make a fair point about the damage that he is doing, they're so loathsome that it's tempting to take his side.
Some critics in Venice were sceptical. John Bleasdale in Time Out called Ink "a toothless, apolitical film" with a "bizarrely moral" Murdoch. Boyle, for his part, has said that he sympathises with the anti-establishment Murdoch of 1969. At a press conference in Venice yesterday, the director stated that, at the time, Murdoch was "a breath of fresh air in what was a very rigid British society".
The time in question is 1969. Having made his mark in Australia, Murdoch moves to London, buys an ailing British daily tabloid newspaper, The Sun, and appoints a working-class northern editor, Larry Lamb (Jack O'Connell), to reinvent it. Initially the film is staged as a high-octane heist movie, with the fast-talking, sharp-suited Lamb zipping around England, gathering a gang of misfits who have been overlooked and under-promoted by other newspapers.
His masterplan is to pinch readers from his competitors by running stories that working people actually want to read – even if that means emphasising subjects which have been sidelined by the British press elsewhere, such as sport, sex and television. And he wants to have fun while doing it, hence Ink has enough office hedonism to rival Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street. Maybe it should have been called The Lamb of Fleet Street.
Questions about responsibility
The suggestion is that Lamb's obsession with sales figures may have led to today's populist media landscape, where nothing is off-limits. But Murdoch himself is portrayed as an almost-innocent bystander. Whenever something salacious is printed in The Sun, it's Lamb who makes the decision to run it, and Murdoch who marches into his office later and demands an explanation. Did he really have so little control over his flagship newspaper's content? In Ink, his only weakness is to be a little too squeamish, a little too hung-up on conventional decency – this despite an opening scene in which he shouts, swears and mimes sex acts in full view of the other diners in a restaurant.
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Ink is Boyle's most Trainspotting-like film since Trainspotting, what with its sex and drugs, its freeze frames and captions, its frantic energy and thumping rock songs, not to mention a stomach-turning shot of a filthy toilet. But it's also a love letter to a man who is depicted as a pioneering entrepreneur, a loyal friend and a doting father with no particular political agenda. The Murdoch dynasty might take issue with parts of the film, but they couldn't object to its portrayal of the family patriarch.
Indeed, Boyle has argued that to "monster-ise" Murdoch would absolve everyone else of their contribution to the state of today's media. In his view, everyone who consumes such media is responsible for it. As he said in Venice on Wednesday, "It was important to us that the audience feels complicit."
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