Kill The Messenger

With a great subject treated lifelessly, this film shies away from taking a stand

The story that Gary Webb broke turned him into a hero of journalism, before it crucified him. As a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, he wrote an investigative series called Dark Alliance in which he said that Nicaraguan drug dealers supplied crack cocaine to the streets of Los Angeles and used the money to fund the Contra rebels in that country. Since the CIA supported the arming of the Contras in the 1980s, Webb said that the Agency had to be complicit in the drug deals, which had a devastating impact on inner city communities.

It was a huge story and the first to go viral online in 1996, when the newspaper uploaded it on its website. As the title of the film suggests, Kill The Messenger is about how the ‘system’ destroyed Gary Webb.

Powerful government networks ferreted dirt on him. The mainstream media, after lapping up his story and turning him into a celebrity, quickly did an about-turn and questioned his data and investigative methods. His own newspaper eventually ditched him and ‘admitted’ that Webb’s investigation was deeply flawed. The subject of the film is fascinating, but unfortunately the treatment is sluggish. The movie puts us to sleep by intermittently playing stock TV footage of the 1980s to build a narrative, rather like in a convoluted political argument by documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, but without his cleverness or humour.

Clearly, director Michael Cuesta has plenty of information on Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner) but no opinion on the quality of his journalism, his legacy as an investigative reporter or even on the personal courage of the man.

Webb was never hired again as a journalist after his story was mercilessly ripped apart by his peers. What does this say about the fine tradition of American journalism? The movie doesn’t adopt a firm position— political or personal—and this absence of a stance is very disappointing.

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Ajit Duara