Gotham Diary:
University Place
23 August 2013
Megan, Ryan, and Will have been enjoying the scenery at Glacier National Park. They’ve gone hiking to the Hidden Lake Overlook. It sounds idyllic — like the beginning of a horror thriller. Nor does it set my mind to rest to contemplate their drive across Interstate Highway 80 in Nevada — especially after reading the review in today’s paper of an apparently lousy movie in which two jerks get stuck/lost in Death Valley. Suddenly I understand why I feel so safe at home: no one has ever set a scary movie in Yorkville.
While Kathleen worked another late evening, I watched yet another movie: State of Play. I was reading This Town, Mark Leibovich’s laugh/cry book about Washington, and mention of the Washington Post Company’s sale of Newsweek reminded me of a more recent sale to Jeff Bezos. I thought it would be interesting to see State of Play in a new perspective. Which was curious, in its way, because State of Play came out only four years ago. It looks a lot older.
Four years ago, Ben Affleck was just beginning his post-Gigli turnaround. He had made the sterling Hollywoodland in 2006, but it went largely unappreciated at the time, despite his very fine performance and an even more amazing one by Diane Lane. Company Men and The Town, in 2010, would reestablish his career, but things were still uncertain enough the year before for him to caricature his washed-up reputation in Mike Judge’s extraordinary Extract. In State of Play, he plays a flawed nice guy who turns out, at the last minute, not to be a nice guy. Russell Crowe is a shoeleathery reporter of prodigious resourcefulness who works for the Washington Globe. Rachel McAdams is the peppery tyro who represents the threat of new media to old-school newspapers before, of course, signing on as the reporter’s Girl Friday. Helen Mirren plays the embattled editor in search of sales, and Robin Wright Penn (as she then was) is the nice guy’s beautiful, humiliated wife. Director Kevin Macdonald knows exactly how to deal with his somewhat cobbled screenplay, and he never allows his film to take its issues (the demise of print journalism and the rise of the surveillance state) too seriously. State of Play is a perfectly satisfying popcorn movie, worth seeing just for its winsome coda, a sequence, showing the step-by-step manufacture of a daily newspaper, that always makes me cry.
I love the old movies, but I’m surprised that State of Play is already one of them.
***
It was only after I’d written the foregoing that I remembered being asked out to lunch by Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil. Ray had the stitches taken out of his arm, which of course meant getting rid of the plaster cast first; the great news was that there was no need to replace the cast. That deserved celebrating, I thought, so, against my shut-in inclinations, I got dressed and took the subway for the first time in so long that I almost went uptown. Then it turned out that my Metro Card had expired. Not to worry. Lunch at the Knickerbocker was classic: a witty trainee waiter was on hand to keep us on our toes. Oysters, fish and chips, chocolate sundaes, not to mention beverages — how is it that Fossil and I are still walking the streets? Afterward, we peered into a few University Place shopwindows before patronizing the downtown branch of Agata & Valentina, which I hadn’t been to before. I bought dinner — very handy! Dinner for two nights, really. It was lovely: the absence of Upper East Siders made me feel that I was on the Riviera. I came home in a taxi, up Park Avenue almost all the way. There is something about the Park Avenue route, from Union Square through Grand Central and on up into my own part of town that makes me take stock of my life. I usually conclude that I am older.
Meanwhile, Megan, Ryan, and Will are in Idaho. Fifty years ago, on a camping trip, I crossed from Idaho into Canada near Bonner’s Ferry. But I still can’t quite believe that there is such a place as Idaho. What I mean, of course, is that I can’t believe that there are people who want to be there, so far from everything that is important to me about human life. Taking stock of my life on Park Avenue (which I appreciate for its arboreal medians but do not find particularly grand), I understood that I have lost the ability to imagine living more than five blocks from it, in either direction. It’s a lucky side-effect of my Gotham provinciality that I have always made an exception for San Francisco.