Sep

8

Dedicated to the upcoming Gary Webb biopic, dir. by Michael Cuesta and starring Jeremy Renner. KILL THE MESSENGER comes by way of Webb's own first-person report in his book, DARK ALLIANCE.

Evocative of policiers such as the 1982 film starring Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemon, MISSING, and the iconic ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, KILL THE MESSENGER announces its aim right from the gate, which is perhaps its only misstep. Kill the messenger tells us too much, too soon, since we are all familiar with the Greek-tradition from which that phrase hails. Famously scripted by Shakespeare in Henry IV (1598) and later in Antony and Cleopatra (1607). Prior to that, a similar sentiment was heard in Sophocles' Antigone: "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news." Messengers with bad tidings from the war front breach the invisible code of conduct, where commanding officers were expected to accept and return emissaries or diplomatic envoys sent by the enemy unharmed. UnKumbaya warrior leaders, of course, never got the memo. Ancient messenger job definitions often failed to add that the job description had unexpected short-range expiry dates.

Reporter Gary Webb, from a tiny provincial newspaper in a minor media market, becomes the unrelenting target of a vicious delegitimization campaign by larger sibling newspapers and the thin-lipped octopus of the federal government operating under dubious justification. The clandestine op was never supposed to have emerged, and it is perplexingly layered and dark, at every level primed for plausible deniability from prying eyes. The pushback, steely and implacable, drives Webb from job and family and to isolation and despair as he exposes the CIA role in arming the Contra rebels in Nicaragua by a Tom Clancy-like black ops to fund rebels via moving unthinkable quantities of cocaine. One kingpin in a grand jury admits to selling more than $1 million a day, of hotel rooms rented solely to stash unmanageable ceiling-high mounds of cash. Though the Agency covers its tracks, confident they are above investigation, as who would dare?, they mount their entrepreneurial cash-only business importing and selling crack: "The powder's for white-folk. It's too pricey for our market," says one dealer.
The fallout, as clips from the 1980s demo—several showing Maxine Waters and other activists of the time, and today–is an epidemic of crack users among the inner cities, in America's black communities. What seems a novel aspect is that even the drug dealers pushing tons through the ghettos do not have an inkling who or what is behind the importation and distribution network. Even they seem flummoxed by the scale of the op, and by its 'sponsors.'

People 'disappear.' Witnesses melt away. Identities sift out of existence.
The exemplary Renner heads a stellar cast in a tautly scripted, tightly packed thriller of how one reporter's diligent reportage of the drug phenomenon of the 1980s was a deliberate, unsanctioned project of Langley, Virginia. Drugs for money for unseating the side the US chose to kick.

The action is as cinema verite kinetic as possible, with major kingpins in jail (Andy Garcia as Norwin Meneses), billionaire 'farmers' leasing their fincas to gun-toting drug processors and flight drops, DC insiders and a host of side players: Ray Liotta, a shadowy character seen in dusky partial light, remorseful but uber-cautious John Cullen; and a sympathetic but stressed, loving wife, Anna (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, empathic in a painful, equivocal role). Curvaceous Paz Vega is underutilized as a top drug-lord's svelte, impossibly gorgeous, scarily manipulative babe, Coral Baca. Michael Sheen is again outstanding (watch him and Lizzy Caplan in "Masters of Sex") as driven, reluctant government deep throat, Fred Weil. Oliver Platt the great plays the tough editor of Webb's home newspaper.

Webb tries to keep the home-fires burning as his life is everted like a Glad Bag in the town dump. The sudden star cub earns his spurs, briefly incandescent in a field laden with hidden and overt landmines.

Most Americans wondered why all of a sudden a crack epidemic burst all over the news; now we know. It was engineered and massaged by lawless Big Feet who needed lots of do-re-mi to fund their pet contras. In the event, millions of young men and women died. Millions of minority kids spent their youths out-smoking their educations and incomes and career aspirations.

The late-comer rival papers and the murky men behind the grey suits and unsmiling faces unsheath their silent threats. One way or the other, how does one lone man stay the course, navigate between ominous antagonists eager to shoot down all those inconvenient 'truths'?

What is deplorably worse, it is all based on a true story. We felt the way Renner/Webb seemed to feel when we were investigating the "suicide" of Vince Foster, Hillary's quondam lawyer, or more, found in peculiar and impossible circumstances in a DC park. Found with an attaché, first full, then empty, with an office first full, then empty. We felt hunted, every moving light at night a threat and a fear. Every window an invitation to a magnum.

How, by the way, does one classify TWO shots to the head as a "suicide"? One is dead after the first shot; any second shot would be impossible.

We vacillate: Is this an anti-patriotic, anti-government exposé depicting the corruption of our investigatory agencies? Or a chapter that needed to be told, damn the consequences?

More than a thriller. Gritty, compelling, fraught with betrayal. Oscar bait.

 


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