Kill the Messenger

Michael Cuesta – 2014 – USA

Jeremy Renner plays troubled San Francisco journalist Gary Webb in this dramatic rendering of his quest to expose one of the most shocking political scandals of the 1990s; the CIA’s involvement in funneling drugs into the U.S. and its culpability in the 80s crack cocaine explosion on inner city streets.  The revelation was an outer ripple of the already labyrinthine Iran-Contra affair that had tarnished the last years of the Reagan administration.  Apparently, the geniuses at the CIA – ordered, illegally, by the White House – to find ways to secretly finance aid to Nicaraguan revolutionaries – thought it would be a great fundraising idea to buy coke from South American cartels, sell it on North American streets, and use the profits to fund covert operations that had already been explicitly outlawed by Congress.  Kill the Messenger is told entirely from Webb’s point of view.  We see him as an idealistic investigative journalist eager to uncover his generation’s Watergate, and he comes very close.  Unfortunately, he also had a desperate streak that made him cut corners and depend too much on impossibly convenient sources.  A handful of discredited assertions essentially destroyed his reputation and he spent his last few years working sporadically and sinking into depression.  The film doesn’t do anything extremely interesting; it just tells a straightforward story with competence.  It is careful not to go out on a limb by claiming to tell the truth about the CIA-cocaine scheme; it’s linked only to Webb himself, and therefore everything depends on whether you believe him at his word or not.  I’m not positive if that’s wise, cowardly or simply a cop-out by being neither.  I guess I can only say that the subject – as with Webb’s book Dark Alliance – is an important one for people to remember when it comes to understanding the dark side of U.S. foreign policy.