Movie Review: “The Paper” — Michael Who?
By Anne Bernays
Two of the films in this sleeper movies series feature Michael Keaton, one of the few actors who stop being themselves and turn into the part they’re playing. This suggests that Keaton has mastered the art of acting so thoroughly that, paradoxically, he’s almost never mentioned with the likes of Clooney, Pitt, Streep, Gosling, and others whose luster never seems to fade, handing out awards or receiving them with the grace of royalty doing us a favor.
“The Paper,” a 1994 product directed by Ron Howard, is about styles of journalism and its responsibilities. Keaton plays Henry Hackett, an editor at The Sun, a New York City daily tabloid. Think Daily News or Daily Mirror, famous for their dazzling headlines and tantalizing leads. Having taught journalists to write fiction for thirty years, I’ve come to realize that journalism is not just a job you go to every weekday, but is a calling, with deeper imperatives than money or status. Young reporters are routinely underpaid and overworked which suggests that “truth” matters to them ahead of any other consideration — money, status, glamorous partners, gold watches or vacations in Tahiti.
“The Paper” takes us through one day in the life the editor of the Sun, a newspaper devoted to both accuracy and thrill. There are a lot of raised voices in its offices and newsrooms. The energy level of its reporters and other employees is as high as that of a big city high school. These folks never heard of emotional restraint.
In an unusual but successful narrative strategy, the screenwriters — David and Stephen Koepp — have made the plot — the guilt or innocence of two young Black men — less important than individual scenes. These scenes, most of them emotionally intense, emphasize the importance of telling a good story at the same time you’re telling the absolute truth. If you think this is easy, just try it.
The daily morning powwow in the editor-in-chief’s office — played flawlessly Robert Duval — during which the next day’s stories are chosen and delegated — is probably as close as you’ll get to the real thing. For more than thirty years at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, I taught newspaper reporters and editors how to write fiction. They rated “The Paper” the most accurate of all the movies about daily journalism.
A side plot: should our hero quit his job and work for the Sentinel, a thinly disguised New York Times, as his pregnant wife wants him to (more money, better hours, the kind of prestige that Hackett doesn’t really give a hoot about). This hands the screenwriter an opportunity to introduce a tight-ass editor (based, I’m certain on Clifton Daniel, the man who married Harry Truman’s daughter Margaret), suited up like a dandy and at work in a muted office.
I give this picture an A-, the minus because it tries a little too obviously to deliver its message which, as everyone knows, is that if there were no honest journalists, the moral monsters would take over and run this place.
