Ink

What is it about the Fourth Estate (newspapers to you and me) that gets cinema so hot? From Citizen Kane to All the President’s Men to Spotlight, movies love a newsroom and printing presses roaring into life, the smell of ink, cigarette smoke, ringing phones and journalists sniffing down a good story. Danny Boyle’s new film Ink is but the latest example: dishing the scoop on the rise of The Sun newspaper from a lowly, little-known Fleet Street title to the biggest-selling newspaper in the world. It’s a story of great potential as the decisions made would affect the media landscape for the next half a century. No Sun – no Fox TV, and where Fox went so went they all.  

We open with Rupert Murdoch, played with effortless shiftiness by Guy Pearce, wining and dining Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell), a lowly subeditor. Murdoch wants him to run his new newspaper: The Sun. There’s much talk of the boring stuffy establishment; much dissing of Reithian values of educating the masses. And once Larry is on board, a lively David versus Goliath story is set up, if David were an arse. Boyle, who’s never seen a kitchen sink he didn’t like throwing, goes for the maximalist approach. Needles drop on punkish pop; captions announce new characters and readership stats, and freeze-framed tableaux of the villains (fuddy-duddy unions, dusty rival newspapermen) are splashed across the front page. There’s even a dramatic kidnapping plot, and of course, the birth of the Page Three girl. 

It’s a David versus Goliath story – if David were an arse

It’s like The Boat That Rocked, but instead of glamorising sexual harassing DJs, Boyle and screenwriter James Graham, adapting his own stage play, are glamorising Life On Mars-style men (and Claire Foy) as they cheerfully break all journalistic rules in pursuit of money and wider distribution. 

The conceit is that the film is Sun-like in its presentation. Bold and bolshy; sexy and fun. So if you like The Sun, you might like this. Except it’s far too tasteful for that. Like all British made period films, it’s in love with its car polish and Bakelite telephones. Even the cigarette smoke looks like it’s been combed. When they finally photograph the first Page Three model, Merchant Ivory couldn’t have made it more arty. 

Ultimately, Ink is a toothless, apolitical film about one of the biggest political changes in British society from the ’60s on. The film concludes with a coda, featuring various mock-ups of famous Sun front pages with ‘permission denied’ written across. But I struggle to see anything in the film – including the portrait of Murdoch, who comes across as bizarrely moral – that could be seen as upsetting the board of News International.   

Ink premiered at the Venice Film Festival. In UK and Ireland cinemas Jan 8.