As the 83rd Venice Film Festival got underway on Wednesday, the opening film, Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” kicked off the event’s 11 days of screenings in the flashy, lively style of the tabloid paper whose origin story it dramatizes.
Jack O’Connell stars as Larry Lamb, the editor hired by Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce), then a rising Australian mogul, to revamp the British newspaper The Sun. You don’t need to watch the movie to know that Lamb succeeded, doubling the paper’s circulation within a year of taking the helm in 1969, and making The Sun, with its infamous red-top headers, Britain’s highest-selling daily by the late 1970s.
“No one knows what Fleet Street is anymore,” Boyle told a news conference on Wednesday, referring to the storied former heart of London’s news media and printing industry. People “keep asking: ‘Is it a film about tattoos?’”
The film, adapted for the screen by James Graham from his own prizewinning play from 2017, compresses The Sun’s rise into a frenzied joyride of biblical proportions. It also has a healthy dose of good old-fashioned British self-deprecation, and a snappy, chaotic style with unsettling flashback sequences and energetic bits of grainy archival footage.
This is Boyle’s first time in Venice competition. He directed “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later,” and with “Ink” he sticks to his idiosyncratic guns — and bracing Brit rock soundtracks — even in the seemingly conventional terrain of the biopic.
Graham called it “an underdog movie,” and Boyle said: “It’s about rebels changing this monolithic, paternalistic order. But you get on the slide, and it’s a lot of fun, but then you’re taken into these dark places.”
It’s not the first time O’Connell has taken audiences through the underworld, so to speak. Last year, he played a sadistic cult leader in Boyle’s zombie apocalypse movie, “The Bone Temple.” His breakout role in “Sinners,” as an Irish vampire terrorizing the patrons of a Mississippi gin joint, has further earned him a reputation for channeling the wicked side of human nature. At the news conference, O’Connell winced when Boyle compared his performance to Al Pacino in “The Godfather.”
Lamb’s sensationalist tactics flouted journalistic conventions by appealing to the working class, and casting off journalism’s elite pretensions of what did and didn’t count as news. (Boyle said that both Murdoch and Lamb “had a loathing for the British establishment, which I personally share.”)
Jules (Claire Foy), a single stand-in for the female journalists who worked for Lamb’, says at one point that people don’t want a mirror image of the world; they want a window to look out and dream.
This means news about celebrities and sports stars, giving out free stuff and printing pictures of scantily clad women. And maybe this pleasurable fluff isn’t all that bad, even as Graham pointed out that there’s a “balance between entertainment and truth.”
In “Ink,” Boyle charts the paper’s moral plummet against its rising sale numbers, zeroing in on two news items in particular among The Sun’s many fraught editorial choices: the 1969 kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay, the wife of the Murdoch associate Alick McKay; and the treatment of Stephanie Rahn, the first model to pose topless for the tabloid’s Page 3 feature.
Although Lamb gets ink (that looks an awful lot like blood) splattered all over his collared shirt in one pivotal scene, Boyle is evenhanded with his critique of the tabloid editor. Movies like Steven Spielberg’s Watergate drama, “The Post,” may tout the importance and dignity of old-school journalism, but “Ink” is far too cynical for such nostalgia.
At the same time, it’s not a total damnation of Lamb and Murdoch, who, hailing from Yorkshire (Lamb) and Australia (Murdoch), are presented with shame-fueled chips on their shoulders about their humble origins. Logan Roy, the Murdoch avatar in the TV series “Succession,” is more ruthless and toxic, but so is his multimedia empire.
In the period when the film is set, the age of disinformation hasn’t entirely set in. But “Ink” gestures at the future to come while refusing to “monsterize” Murdoch, Boyle said, adding, “he represented a breath of fresh air in what was a really rigid British society.”
A discomfort with the modern news media — its uneasy future as well as the damage it has wrought in the past — is a theme of this year’s Venice showcase, which includes a documentary about Elon Musk, directed by Alex Gibney, as well as a drama starring Robert Pattinson about Chris Hansen, the host of the influential 2000s crime show “To Catch a Predator.”
“Ink” has some damning things to say about the profit-motivated bent of the contemporary news media, too. Its vivid re-creation of what journalism used to look like — not just the editorial brainstorming, but the printing press’s beautiful “dirt, steam and filth” as Graham called it — comes off with a gritty romance.
“We filmed at a real printing press in north London, one of the few remaining in the U.K.,” Boyle said. But when they went back to do some reshoots, he added, “we were told that they’re closing. There’s not enough work.”
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