VENICE — Danny Boyle is not a director known for restraint. His films tend to announce themselves. “Ink,” which opened the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 2, did the same, except that what it announced was a version of Rupert Murdoch that Guy Pearce renders with enough precision to make the film’s critical reception feel like something more than praise.
The reviews quickly converged on a common frame. “Citizen Kane by way of Trainspotting” appeared often enough in early assessments to become the shorthand for a film about media power made by a director whose previous work focused on something entirely different. Whether the comparison holds is another question. The 92 percent rating “Ink” currently holds on Rotten Tomatoes suggests enough critics found the comparison at least partly convincing.
As Venice closes tonight with the Golden Lion ceremony, “Ink” is positioned to be discussed as either the festival’s film of the year or the film that should have won. Neither outcome is predetermined, and neither will be decided until the jury delivers its verdict later tonight on the Lido.
The cast works in layers. Pearce’s Murdoch is the film’s gravitational center, but Jack O’Connell and Claire Foy occupy the space around him in ways reviewers have described with unusual care. O’Connell plays a young Fleet Street journalist drawn into Murdoch’s orbit, a structural device that gives the film a point of entry less interested in hagiography than in the logic of proximity to power.
Foy, whose work in “The Crown” established her as the actor of choice for stories about institutions and the people who survive inside them, has a role that critics have declined to summarize too precisely, which is itself a form of praise.
The title is itself a statement. Newsprint is the medium Murdoch built his empire on before television and before digital, and the word’s reference to both the physical substance and the permanence of what gets written is the kind of deliberate choice Boyle tends to make. Whether the film earns the metaphor is something reviewers have not fully resolved. The “Citizen Kane” comparison does as much work as it is comfortable with, and the ambiguity is probably intentional.
No US distribution deal for “Ink” has been publicly announced. The Venice competition is as credible a distribution catalyst as exists in the fall festival circuit, and a Golden Lion or jury prize tonight would accelerate whatever conversations are currently under way. The absence of a confirmed deal for a film this prominent is either a negotiation still in progress or evidence that the subject matter made studios slower to move than they might otherwise have been.
The competition “Ink” faces is genuine. Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” a Cold War procedural with John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as CIA operatives in 1973 Chile, received 14 minutes of applause at its premiere, the longest standing ovation of this year’s festival. A24’s “Primetime,” directed by Lance Oppenheim and starring Robert Pattinson, earned seven minutes of applause and a Metacritic score of 76. Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal presides over a competition that has not made her decision easy. As The Hollywood Reporter noted in its festival coverage, McDonagh’s film generated enthusiasm that positioned it alongside “Ink” as one of the two most consequential entries in competition.
Casey Affleck’s “Company” rounds out the competition’s most-discussed entries, as Eastern Herald’s coverage of the Venice Golden Lion race has tracked throughout the festival. The broader fall awards conversation, with TIFF running its People’s Choice vote simultaneously, means that whatever Venice decides tonight, the conversation is unlikely to settle for months.
Pearce has spent the better part of three decades in films that put him opposite complexity rather than clarity. His Murdoch reportedly carries that quality: a man who genuinely believes, at some level, in the enterprise he built, and whose belief is the film’s most unsettling argument. Whether that reading holds for the jury as it does for critics is tonight’s open question, and it is the kind of question that has no certain answer until the ceremony concludes.
Ellen Burstyn, 93, receives a Lifetime Achievement honor at tonight’s closing ceremony. The Golden Lion ceremony begins tonight. The Lido has been waiting ten days for the jury’s answer.
