Ink, adapted from James Graham’s stage play and drawn from real life, opens in 1969 London on Fleet Street, the heart of the city’s newspaper business. The young, Australia-born Rupert Murdoch—played, with almost alarming charisma, by Guy Pearce—isn't yet a mover and shaker in the news business. But he has a proposition for a brash Yorkshire newspaperman whose career has taken a nosedive. Would this guy, Larry Lamb—Jack O’Connell, crackling with roguish charm—like to spearhead the relaunch of a paper Murdoch has just purchased? The two meet in a tony London restaurant where newspaper deals are made, tussling like bulls as they outline their ideas of what news should be. Then they stride out into the night, and as they pass the paper’s offices, they drop down on all fours to feel the rumble of the printing presses belowground. Newspapers are in their blood; they can’t differentiate between their own heartbeat and the clanking of tomorrow’s edition rolling off the cylinders.
Pearce, center, as Rupert Murdoch —Courtesy of NetflixThe first half of Ink tells the story of the Sun’s ascension, from its lagging position behind its hugely successful rival, the Daily Mirror, to a tabloid that seduced readers with new kinds of coverage. What, exactly, were working-class Londoners interested in reading about, Lamb would ask his assembled staff, including a starchily old-school deputy editor imported from Liverpool (Patrick Kennedy), a possibly over-the-hill sports editor (Christopher Fulford), and, most notably, the crackerjack newswoman Jules (Claire Foy, fierce as a firecracker), who’s been sleeping with the married Lamb for years in an arrangement that suits them both. He’s now given her the luxury of editing a “woman’s page,” which she’s free to fill with whatever she likes, including the radical feminist ideas that drive her. (She ends up printing an excerpt of the banned-in-Britain book The Sensuous Woman, a manual written to help women navigate and understand their own sexuality—though she makes it clear that it's the guys who really ought to be reading it.)
Foy as formidable newswoman Jules —Courtesy of NetflixDoes Lamb want to help solve the mystery at the heart of this crime, or is his job to stay out of it and let the police do their job? He’s too addicted to sensationalism to know when to stop. In the story Ink tells, Murdoch is in thrall to Lamb and his instincts, even as he frequently recoils from them. He sees what’s unsavory about Lamb’s approach and, more than once, moves to restrain him; then he sees the uptick in the Sun’s sales figures and zips his lip. If you’d prefer to think of Murdoch as an individual wholly devoid of sex appeal, Pearce’s performance might rattle you; his Murdoch is shrewd but not inhuman—even monsters were young once. Foy's character is a composite and not based on a specific individual, but she avoids all the pitfalls of playing a symbol. Jules is a woman in an overwhelmingly masculine world, so devoted to her work she doesn’t want to be anywhere else, but she never makes it look easy. Foy plays Jules' moments of doubt with piercing clarity—she sees the moral cracks in her boss-and-lover's ambitious strategies, and she voices them, but there are no moments of obvious triumph. Jules lives and works in a space where standing your ground can only make you exceedingly lonely.
And still, O’Connell’s Larry Lamb is a guy you want to root for, even if, as a modern person with a reasonable awareness of what’s happened to the news media in the internet age, you can see he’s making the snowball that starts the avalanche. O'Connell plays Lamb as somehow disreputable and principled at once; it’s simply that he’d rather be right than do right. He’s the kind of brazen, disreputable showman you want to creep closer to—even the young Murdoch feels it. Ink works as both a fictionalized snapshot of a lost world and a forensic exploration of what happens when you give the people what they want, instead of what they don’t know they want. It’s a movie about the beginning of an end, brought about by enterprising men who just wanted to sell papers. So thrilled by the lede they were writing, they gave zero forethought to the kicker.
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