If anyone can properly detonate the story of how insatiable greed brought global society to the post-truth tabloid hell we all boil in now, it’s Danny Boyle. The polyvalent English director is always a delight to watch for the terrific vitality of his films; no matter how difficult the subject, he will make each shot alive and sizzling like a short fuse throughout. This intense liveliness, of course, is delicately balanced against the accompanying threat of a slip into neurosis. With Boyle, one never knows when he’ll loosen his hand and drop the nitroglycerin.
This approach of volatility with a sense of danger proves ideal for a screen version of Ink, based on the 2017 play by the famed British dramatist James Graham, which narrates the path a young(er) Rupert Murdoch and news editor Larry Lamb took to make The Sun “the most read newspaper in the world.” Adapted for the screen by Graham himself, it stars a supremely commanding Jack O’Connell as Lamb and comfortably playful Guy Pierce as Murdoch. In the words of a colleague who extolled it after the screening, Ink is “a cracker”.
On a traditionally rainy London night in Fall 1969, an aspiring Australian businessman, Rupert Murdoch (Pierce), courts a frustrated sub-editor of The Mirror, Larry Lamb (O’Connell), a working-class journalist who senses he will never find his place among the patricians. Murdoch, to whom local toffs refer as the “antipodean”, is the merry, seductive voice of the promise of a brave new world—he doesn’t care about titles, tradition, methods, or truth, for that matter. What he cares about is business and growth, no matter the cost. Lamb’s only solemn duty will be to deliver a globally bestselling newspaper for Murdoch. How this formidable goal would be reached is irrelevant.
Lured by the promise of a power he could never otherwise reach, Lamb reluctantly agrees to become editor of The Sun, a heretofore “laughing stock” of a paper on the iconic newspaper-publishing Fleet Street. The weight of the conversation grows as the stakes instantly become clear—Lamb takes Murdoch to kneel in the middle of Fleet Street and feel the ground tremble from the power of the printing presses. It’s the ideology of a nation that is, or can be, decided on those pages.
In a typical Boylean rapid-fire montage, Lamb scampers to assemble his publishing Avengers, comprised mostly of rejects, losers, or degenerates (or all three). Among them, however, one person stands out: Jules Davies (a fictional character played superbly by Claire Foy), a talented reporter with a head full of ideas who’s never gotten her due because of misogynistic shunning. Jules takes on The Sun with a modicum of integrity, excited by the prospect of actually controlling the narrative for the first time. Things are somewhat complicated by her being Lamb’s long-term mistress and confidant.
The rest of what’s to follow you already know, more or less. To get ahead of the competition, Lamb and his cohort of entrepreneurial little devils will decide to break the mold of journalism and redesign what they think should constitute the highest public interest. This, as it turns out, is gossip and scandals, peppered with sex and violence. The weather forecast is front and center, too, just nothing so tedious as investigative journalism or measured, factual reporting.
The “move fast and break things” mentality is ideal for a Danny Boyle film, and the director has a field day with propulsive shots, faux scattershot angles, and surprising or staccato cuts and edits. As Murdoch strokes Lamb’s hard ambition, the hinges quickly come off, and the limits to what’s possible are gone. Blurring the lines between newspaper narratives and TV content? Yes. Dishing out scandalous headlines while neglecting underlying societal phenomena? Sure. Big spreads of naked young women to pique the fancy of the honest men? Absolutely. Lamb will keep pushing until The Sun becomes No. 1.
Workers’ unions and the establishment alike push back, but there is no stopping the incoming age of sensation (Lamb and Davis would say “sensuous”). Even when tragedy strikes—in fact, especially then—Murdoch and Lamb’s show must go on, and the public will become hooked on the shock, suspense, and taboo. So they do, with the dire consequences felt to this day.
Even at times when Boyle’s vision seems to go relatively easy on these profoundly unethical characters, O’Connell and Pierce remain captivating to watch. The two play off each other perfectly; their Lamb and Murdoch are magnetic and “real” in the context of their liberal business aspirations and obstacles, but they are not humanized to the point of being “relatable” or worthy of empathy.
Indeed, Ink’s greatest strength is that it shows both sides of this sordid war to be despicable. The traditionally impenetrable caste system where a few decide on the fates of the many is as horrendous as the neoliberal focus on perpetual growth where anything at all goes, so long as it brings profit. The changes to the notion of news that Murdoch and Lamb effected may be (or may have been) aesthetic, but the realm of the aesthetic is an ideological one, and Boyle hits a bullseye by zeroing in on the inescapable politics of both decision and consensus-making.
If Lamb is inevitably positioned in this battle as an aspiring underdog, it’s a testament to O’Connell’s skill that he never comes across as a guy to root for despite the shortcomings of the existing system. All power left unchecked is something to be afraid of, and the road to the top is never paved with the best intentions. The monocled English “gentlemen” are mostly despicable, but sticking it up to their traditions doesn’t imply the world will be better off under a new rule.
If anything, Ink implies that nothing is more dangerous for the masses than a paradigm shift. Indeed, new paradigms, new victors, and new technologies emerge in Ink, but not only in this story of our 21st-century media landscape: Boyle uses controversial generative AI to animate several shots in another shift that we’re also enduring today.
Despite an overly straightforward script that drives the same point home many times over, Ink is a vital watch, smart enough to show that a tale of a rise to power is a cautionary tale no matter who ends up holding it. The film is light on moralizing but goes all the way in showing just how horrid the history of contemporary media has been and continues to be.